Richly entertaining melodrama about the US labor movement, reminiscent of both early Steinbeck and John Sayles’s Union Dues, from the prolific author of popular naval adventures (such as The Circle, 1992) and sociopolitical thrillers (e.g., The Only Thing to Fear, 1995). The story’s set in western Pennsylvania’s “Petroleum City,” site of the Thunder Oil Company, and a disastrous industrial accident that kills five workers and sets their surviving “brethren” against a management indifferent to cost-ineffective safety procedures—and determined to break the will of the hastily assembled union. CIO organizer (and Communist Party member) Doris Golden spearheads the struggle, abetted by sturdy, young well-driller W.T. Halvorsen (with whom she soon begins an affair). Thunder Oil’s President Dan Thunner (a well-drawn and by no means simply evil character) hires cold-eyed Pinkerton man and professional strikebreaker Pearl Deatherage (a Gordon Liddy—like amoralist), thus setting in motion a smartly paced series of impassioned meetings (even Eleanor Roosevelt shows up, the time being 1936), pitched battles, and other crises, climaxing with a winner-take-all boxing match (!) between Halvorsen (who’s handy with his dukes) and Thunner’s carefully groomed show fighter, murderous Jack McKee. Few readers will likely resist this exhilarating nonsense, despite an abundance of clichÇs (yes, there’s a turncoat who eventually finds his manhood and makes a supreme sacrifice; and Poyer does end with Halvorsen’s crassly Steinbeckian vow that “as long as somebody was hungry . . . . He knew . . . [who] he was going to stand with”). The novel is fortunately graced by consistently vivid writing and knowingly detailed descriptions of such relevant manly pursuits as boxing and deerhunting along with (really first-rate) explications of the oil refining process. If Poyer hasn’t exactly rewritten The Grapes of Wrath, he has given us a rousing good read, and one that ought to make a nifty miniseries.
Pub Date: March 17, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-86494-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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