The most successful madam in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, hires her own detectives to get to the bottom of her mother's murder in the latest western by one of the best writers in the genre (Come Winter, Remember Santiago, etc.). Indians are going out, electricity is coming in. It is the 1890's in western Arkansas, just across the river from Indian territory. Jewel Moon, whose silent partners in the operation of her very well-run bordello are a Jewish shopkeeper and a leading WASP banker, has employed suspended US Deputy Marshal Oscar Schiller to apply his formidable skills to an investigation of a murder. She is far from satisfied with the official findings, which failed to answer why her hard-bitten, nymphomaniac mother Temperance Moon fell to close-fired blasts from a very fancy shotgun in Indian territory. Schiller in turn hires Syrian-born Kansas City policeman Moses Masada to assist him, with the two detectives following various trails from Ft. Smith to the Indian nations and back again until they begin to piece together a story of blackmail, theft, betrayal, and hatred pulling together the banker, a social-climbing Cajun, an uncontrollable Comanche, a misplaced Delaware, numerous Creeks, a couple of bootleggers, Miss Moon's love child, and the most beautiful Indian woman on earth. While all this is going on, Schiller is the target of potshots and of the amorous advances of his landlady; someone tries to blow up the bordello; and Moses Masada falls for the beautiful Indian. Jones continues to enchant. This is not for only western readers.
Pub Date: May 20, 1991
ISBN: 0-8050-1387-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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