Sunken gold, black magic, sea monsters, a beautiful Brazilian in a bikini—what more could you want from a summer thriller?
Thrills and chills come with shipwrecked treasure as a recent college grad searches for his missing brother on the Mexican coast.
Dan Duran is traveling the world. The last postcard he sent home is four months old and his mother fears that this time, her oldest has gotten himself killed. Not an outlandish assumption—he’s already been in foreign jails for smuggling drugs and antiquities. As a favor to Mom, brother Jack and his college buddies Duff and Rock agree to look around Puerto Vallarta for Dan. What they find is a lifetime’s worth of adventure in the space of a week. After a harrowing night at a Mexican biker bar (Jack wakes to find “Yanqui Go Home” carved into his back), they follow one final lead to Dan’s last known whereabouts, the cursed village of Punta Perdida. They hitch a ride down the coast on the Obi-man, a state-of-the-art yacht manned by two gorgeous women—Eva and Candy—and owned by the mysterious Leo Bellocheque, a Bahamian businessman with an agenda of his own. In Punta Perdida, Jack finds a deaf-mute priest who has Dan’s journal and swears Dan is dead. Piecing together clues from Dan’s notes, which include a rubbing of a gold coin Bellocheque had earlier said belonged to his great-great-grandfather, Jack demands some answers. It seems Dan had contacted Bellocheque months ago, sending the gold coin as proof of his discovery of the sunken treasure of the Argonaut. A slave ship turned gold convoy, it carried the fortune of Bellocheque’s ancestor, a freed man who was swindled and enslaved by the ship’s captain. With the gold under the yacht, the group could make quick work of the retrieval except for a few deadly obstacles: a man-eating manta ray called El Diablo Blanco, the murderous, devil-worshipping residents of Punta Perdida and speed-sniffing gangsters looking for Dan’s gold. Overwriting rears its head as many times as the manta ray: “My life was to be thrown away for these cursed lumps of ore.” But never mind, it’s all part of the campy fun of the treasure hunt.
Sunken gold, black magic, sea monsters, a beautiful Brazilian in a bikini—what more could you want from a summer thriller?Pub Date: July 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34373-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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
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