A love story that becomes elevated by a dynamic psychological crime drama.
A young reporter investigates a series of murders involving body image in this mix of romance and thriller.
Camarin Torres is on the brink of graduating from NYU with no full-time job to show for all of her ambition and hard work—that is, until a serendipitous meeting on a train with Lyle Fletcher, the new owner of a failing magazine called Trend. Fletcher, impressed with Camarin’s intelligence and passion for justice, decides that she’s exactly what Trend needs to head in a more serious editorial direction. They also sense a mutual attraction, which Fletcher, a middle-aged widower, feels uncomfortable admitting given his position of authority. On her first day of work, Camarin becomes intrigued by a grisly murder case involving the owner of a Chicago weight-loss organization. A quick search of similar cases yields the insight that a string of killings has followed the revival meetings of Terry Mangel, a man who has made a fortune on programs that tell people to love their bodies just the way they are. Every murder victim has in some way been involved in dieting or fat-shaming. As Camarin becomes more invested in tracking down the killers, she faces the resurfacing of uncomfortable memories surrounding her dead twin sister, who struggled with her weight and self-confidence. Camarin’s passion for her work rises along with her ardor for Fletcher, who, unbeknown to her, has his own secrets concerning these homicides. Barr (Expired Listings, 2016) has a knack for building stakes and maintaining a steadily intense pace throughout. The novel occasionally suffers from clunky lines, particularly in the romance sections, as when a sexually heated Camarin thinks, “While she wanted to stand firm in her resolve against discrimination, her impulsive streak beckoned her to explore the one thing she realized she wanted even more.” But the unusual premise of the murder plot brings a freshness to the thriller sections, and Camarin faces absorbing (if slightly reductive) dilemmas involving the ethics of journalism and the body-image industry.
A love story that becomes elevated by a dynamic psychological crime drama.Pub Date: July 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9977118-4-4
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Punctuated Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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