Spookers are the rainy-day funds that intelligence agents amass against the time when they must decampwhereon hangs a flimsy tale from Ing (Butcher Bird, 1993, etc.). Although slow on the uptake, the CIA eventually realizes that ever since the late '60s freelance mercenaries have been offing undercover operatives (foreign as well as domestic) for their getaway money. The first victim seems to have been Skander Roman Masaryk, a Czech engineer raised in Canada during WW II, who was kidnapped and presumably beaten to death in 1968. The disappearances continue, but leads are in short supply and the case file builds until 1993, when investigators catch a much-needed break. At that time, the anonymous assassins go after Gary Landis, a Fresno-based DEA man. Panicked by a cryptic note and a hail of bullets, Landis bolts—but before he can clear his garage, he's grabbed, drugged, and left for dead at the bottom of a mine shaft with two other bodies. By some unexplained miracle, the young fed doesn't succumb and starts tracking his would-be killers. It soon becomes clear that another survivor, the not-dead defector Masaryk (in fact, a gender-jumbled freak able to live as a woman), and Andrew Soriano, his/her adoptive son, are the culprits. From the privileged sanctuary of a high-tech residential complex on the Yomo Indian reservation, this strange pair has been preying on targets of opportunity in the West Coast's intelligence community for over two decades. As Landis stalks the erstwhile hunters, they reveal themselves to be exceptionally nasty pieces of work. Soriano, for example, performs unspeakable acts upon the bodies of small furry animals, finally does in his domineering mom (Masaryk), and engineers a climactically degrading confrontation with Landis that ends badly for all hands. A second-rate thriller with little pace or suspense, albeit an abundance of loose ends and shock-value details.
Pub Date: Nov. 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85740-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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