Another triumph in the genre: Kelton, author of some 40 novels, holds a record seven Spur Awards.
Sixth and final (we think) entry in the Texas Rangers saga by Kelton.
Texas Vendetta (2004) brought into the 1870s the story begun in 1861 with The Buckskin Line (1999), when the raggle-taggle first Texas Rangers of Mexican Texas protected landowners from marauding Indians. The Indians are peaceful or gone now, but the Rangers still have business protecting Mexican-Americans from Texas-Americans and vice versa. Kelton starts out this time with immense laugh-out-loud humor, but phrases soon arise with cloudy hints that maybe it’s time for Ranger Andy Pickard, now 25, to pack in his badge (though a Ranger has no badge, unless he makes one for himself) and turn to thoughts of homesteading with Bethel Brackett. As it happens, he’s thrown in with fellow Ranger Farley Brackett, Bethel’s loutish, Mexican-hating brother, and with motormouth Len Tanner, and is posted to the still disputatious border country along the Rio Grande, where raids on each other’s stock are common between Texans and Mexicans. Along the way to their new post, the trio is bushwhacked for their horses but manage to drive off their attackers, killing one. The thieves, led by Burt Hatton, later bury their dead member, the hotheaded young nephew of the wife of their boss, cattleman (and rustler) Jericho Jackson. Jackson has a warning sign posted on his land: “This is Jericho’s road. Take the other.” He has fortified his ranch with a big wall, as in the story of Joshua in the Bible—and who will blow it down? Across the border in Mexico, Jericho’s rival is Guadalupe Chavez, who has a giant cattle ranch and rustles Jericho’s cattle, among others’. When Burt Hatton lies, telling Jericho that his wife’s hotheaded nephew was slain by Lupe Chavez, Jericho decides somehow to kill Chavez’s nephew, who works as a hand for Big Jim McCawley just north of the border. And so war erupts between Jericho and Chavez, with Rangers in the middle.
Another triumph in the genre: Kelton, author of some 40 novels, holds a record seven Spur Awards.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-30955-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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