A zigzagging mystery with an intuitive, competent protagonist.
A forensic psychologist in the mid-1990s consults on an investigation of the murder of her former intern in Averett’s (Cameron and the Girls, 2013, etc.) thriller.
It’s not the first time that Detective Olive Durant has hired Dr. Carmen Carillo as a consultant. The difference is that, in this case, Carmen knows the murder victim. Cops discovered Dr. Denny Musgrove’s mangled corpse inside the carcass of an eviscerated cow. Carmen had supervised him years before while he was a graduate student, and both doctors eventually had practices in Lamona, Washington. Denny’s last patient was Vincent Berenga, whom Carmen had referred to him and who’s now missing. Carmen knows that Vincent’s capable of such a grisly murder, but as the investigation continues, she’s surprised by a number of things that Denny had been up to, from making house calls for patients to possibly cheating on his wife. Complicating matters is Sturdevant Day, who owns the property where police found Denny’s body and who’s caring for his sickly neighbor, Evangeline (who happens to be Vincent’s mom). Carmen falls for the handsome Sturdevant, but she refuses to allow that to distract her from the case, which soon involves another murder with the same M.O. and a physical threat against Carmen herself. Averett gets his mystery off to a running start, establishing the various character relationships early. Along the way, there are myriad plot turns, not just regarding the investigation, but Carmen’s personal life as well. Readers may find some of the material that Carmen digs into, such as pornography, to be relatively tame, but they give the protagonist opportunities to view the case from a more clinical perspective, which adds credibility to the story. Her narration is rife with questions, effectively indicating the amateur sleuth’s tendency to constantly examine what she’s learned. A significant drawback, however, is the fact that Olive is limited to periodic appearances, as Carmen tends to work alone; as a result, two minor characters’ offensive slights against the detective have less impact, as only Carmen is there to hear them.
A zigzagging mystery with an intuitive, competent protagonist.Pub Date: June 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9989359-0-4
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Wellborn Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 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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