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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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