A straightforward ’70s mystery, helped by a sweet love story.
In Coakley’s debut novel, a young woman from Chattanooga, Tennessee, settles in upstate New York in 1976, finds romance, and stumbles upon a murder.
Thirty-two-year-old rural-manpower representative Becca Collins uses her “Southern sweetness” to secure factory jobs for migrants and seasonal farmworkers. She’s attracted to her supervisor, Brick Wilson, but his married status makes him off-limits. Then she discovers widower Jack Hightower, a “funny and sexy” high school football coach with whom she wouldn’t mind scoring. The two meet through Danny Washington, a student whom Jack coaches. Becca helped Danny’s mom, Rose, get an apartment for herself, her kids, and her occasional boyfriend, Otis Brown. She also helped her land a factory job, working for the charismatic Golden Smith. When Golden asks Becca for an urgent, late-hour meeting concerning Rose, the Tennessee transplant wonders what exactly he wants to discuss. But then Golden is beaten to death, not long before Becca arrives at the factory; she becomes a suspect, even as the killer targets her as his next victim. Juggling her work and her interviews with police and reporters, Becca struggles to find time to spend with Jack, who’s a magnet for single women. The 1970s time frame in this somewhat easy-to-solve mystery is effectively signaled by references to Brick’s stylish denim suit and Becca’s sporty Dodge Colt automobile. But it also includes timely discussions of changing black/white race relations and of workplace discrimination against women; for example, Becca and the other “girls” are seen as “window dressing” in the mostly male office. Coakley is a former rural-manpower representative for the New York State Department of Labor, and the plight of migrant workers, in particular, looms large in her novel. But there’s also a romance that’s as pleasant as a Southern smile, as well as humor, some of it unexpected, such as when Becca attends a post-funeral gathering at the Smith home and is “embarrassed at her excitement over the thought of partaking” in platters of food. Some creepy passages from the killer’s perspective perk up the otherwise casual pace, but the descriptions of Becca’s wardrobe choices are overdone.
A straightforward ’70s mystery, helped by a sweet love story.Pub Date: April 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4834-3021-8
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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