One of this mystery’s investigators may be fluffy, but this thoroughly entertaining novel certainly isn’t.
A recent murder stirs up a cop’s memories of being shot in the line of duty in Ball’s (A Wedding on Ladybug Farm, 2014, etc.) latest thriller.
Aggie Malone, the police chief of Dogleg Island, Florida, barely survived when Darrell Reichart shot her in the head two years ago. She now lives with a bullet lodged in her brain and worries about Darrell’s upcoming trial for his parents’ murders. However, Aggie has the support of her boyfriend, Capt. Ryan Grady, and her faithful companion, Flash, a border collie that was found at the murder scene. Aggie and Flash find a body in the trunk of a car they find in a lagoon, and it turns out that it has a connection to the Reichart killings. Soon Aggie finds herself recalling new details of her own shooting—including the fact that another person was there that night. Meanwhile, her investigation draws her closer and closer to a murderer who hasn’t finished killing quite yet. This is an ample murder mystery with an enthralling protagonist. The story slowly reveals Aggie’s recuperation in flashbacks, and these scenes pay dividends: her injury ultimately ignited her relationship with Grady, and her recurring visions eventually lead to the unraveling of the mystery. The four-legged titular character is endearing and indispensable, and Ball gives him a straightforward perspective: he thinks in basic terms, with Aggie’s safety always in the forefront of his mind. He’s a fine sidekick, and he may be a bit smarter than his human counterparts: he suggests (by barking) that Aggie question a potential witness and exposes (with more barking) a supposed accident as an attempted murder. Ball does such an outstanding job developing Aggie, Flash, and other characters, such as retired sheriff Jerome Bishop, that the murder case gets less attention and decidedly fewer pages. Indeed, readers will likely solve the mystery with relative ease—and wonder why Aggie doesn’t solve it with equal promptness.
One of this mystery’s investigators may be fluffy, but this thoroughly entertaining novel certainly isn’t.Pub Date: May 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0985774899
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Blue Merle Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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