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Ivy League Killers

Name: Ivy League Killers
Author: Dave Cherry

by Dave Cherry ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Killers for hire make a surprisingly charming couple in this straightforward thriller.

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In Cherry’s (Sweep Rowing, 2014) novel, a young married couple share their love of rowing, spending time at the gun range, and handling contract killings for a covert organization.

Tom Martin was always a bright kid and managed to become a skilled oarsman by the time he made it into Princeton. But his life changes immeasurably when a bank robber who enjoys killing hostages murders his beloved foster father. After Tom successfully interrupts the robber’s subsequent heist, “the Group” makes contact to offer him a regular gig—contract proposals for assassinations. Tom reluctantly tells Emily, the love of his life, about his new job offer. Luckily, Emily’s interested in joining him, having already offed a rapist who victimized two of her friends. They squeeze contracts among their meals, marriage, and family visits. The novel can sometimes be playfully cynical, offsetting the characters’ lethal occupation. For example, after a hit, Emily lovingly tells Tom, “Well done sweetheart.” The tone, however, is generally earnest, and the back stories for the co-leads provide credible, sympathetic reasons for why they would commit murder. Similarly, Tom and Emily relentlessly analyze everything, from whether or not they should categorize themselves as serial killers to the possible consequences of denying a request from the Group. Their questioning of their actions so much makes the two seem like a typical couple and much less like cold killers. It’s even easy to forget the killings when there are constant reminders of the familiar, loving duo, like Emily repeatedly singsonging Tom’s name, “Taaaaum?” Cherry bolsters his tale with a bit of mystery: Emily finds evidence that suggests her father, retired cop Cal, is a murderer as well. And while most of the hits go off without a snag, later chapters add suspense when the stakes escalate and injuries occur. The book unfortunately ends a little too suddenly and feels more like a setup for a sequel than a resolution.

Killers for hire make a surprisingly charming couple in this straightforward thriller.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dog Ear

Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.

Pub Date: June 1, 1985

ISBN: 068487122X

Page Count: 872

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.