Scapegrace diver Tiller Galloway finds the inner space of limestone caves as risky as the open-ocean deeps probed in his three previous outings (Louisiana Blue, 1994, etc.). With precious little going for him on North Carolina's Outer Banks, Tiller willingly heads to Florida when Monica Kusczk asks for his help after the supposedly accidental death of her husband Bud (with whom Galloway served as a SEAL in Vietnam). Also on the trip to Tallahassee is Tiller's sullen teenaged son Tad, who has run away from his demanding mother. Once in the Sunshine State, Tiller helps manage the diving equipment store owned by his dead friend, takes up the dangerous sport of cave diving, and starts a relationship with the receptive Monica. In short order, Tiller finds that the pitch-dark caverns created by aquifers are treacherous venues and no place for amateurs, and learns from a hardcase emissary that Bud had been laundering money for a Colombian coke cartel and that he's expected to do the same. Meantime, Tiller (convinced that Bud's demise was no mishap) determines that a socially prominent local has been diverting water from underground springs to his closely guarded nursery, where, among other cash crops, he's hydroponically cultivating coca leaves and marijuana. With two sets of villains on his case, the renegade mariner (who's done time himself for drug-running) calls in the feds. The overeager DEA makes a shambles of the resultant raid, and Monica (whom Tiller was beginning to love) is gunned down in a crossfire. With unexpected assistance from Tad, however, Galloway survives the wild shootout. When the heat dies down, he returns home to Cape Hatteras with his son, sadder, wiser, and with nearly $1 million in untraceable greenbacks. White-knuckle diving scenes, constant action, and a raffish antihero whose motives lie well below the surface make the latest chapter in the motley tale of Tiller Galloway a welcome addition to Poyer's offbeat series.
Pub Date: Nov. 19, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14589-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the...
Hannah’s sequel to Firefly Lane (2008) demonstrates that those who ignore family history are often condemned to repeat it.
When we last left Kate and Tully, the best friends portrayed in Firefly Lane, the friendship was on rocky ground. Now Kate has died of cancer, and Tully, whose once-stellar TV talk show career is in free fall, is wracked with guilt over her failure to be there for Kate until her very last days. Kate’s death has cemented the distrust between her husband, Johnny, and daughter Marah, who expresses her grief by cutting herself and dropping out of college to hang out with goth poet Paxton. Told mostly in flashbacks by Tully, Johnny, Marah and Tully’s long-estranged mother, Dorothy, aka Cloud, the story piles up disasters like the derailment of a high-speed train. Increasingly addicted to prescription sedatives and alcohol, Tully crashes her car and now hovers near death, attended by Kate’s spirit, as the other characters gather to see what their shortsightedness has wrought. We learn that Tully had tried to parent Marah after her father no longer could. Her hard-drinking decline was triggered by Johnny’s anger at her for keeping Marah and Paxton’s liaison secret. Johnny realizes that he only exacerbated Marah’s depression by uprooting the family from their Seattle home. Unexpectedly, Cloud, who rebuffed Tully’s every attempt to reconcile, also appears at her daughter’s bedside. Sixty-nine years old and finally sober, Cloud details for the first time the abusive childhood, complete with commitments to mental hospitals and electroshock treatments, that led to her life as a junkie lowlife and punching bag for trailer-trash men. Although powerful, Cloud’s largely peripheral story deflects focus away from the main conflict, as if Hannah was loath to tackle the intractable thicket in which she mired her main characters.
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the pages turning even as readers begin to resent being drawn into this masochistic morass.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-57721-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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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