Leonard returns to the Florida coastline for his weakest novel since Touch (1987)—a bumpily humorous but unfocused seriofarce about a probation officer and the eccentric judge she gets entangled with. As one of Leonard's very few heroines in 29 novels, spunky Kathy Baker of the Florida Dept. of Corrections blows a whiff of fresh air into the Leonard canon—as does the outspoken, aging hanging-judge Bob Gibbs—but not enough to put the spring into a slack plot that begins when skirt-chasing Gibbs takes a fancy to Kathy as she shows up in his courtroom with probation-violator Dale Crowe Junior. Gibbs throws the book at Dale, then asks former psychology-major Kathy out on a date under the guise of her talking to his wife, a former showgirl who seems to be possessed by the spirit of a 12-year-old 18th-century slave girl. Before Kathy can visit Gibbs, however, a hugh alligator appears on his property and sends his wife scurrying for northern climes. And that's just fine by Gibbs, who turns out to have imported the gator to get rid of his loony wife. But when Gibbs double-deals Dickey Campau, who brought the gator, Campau drives out to the judge's home and shoots up the house. Which is just as well, because the shots scare off Elvin Crowe, Dale's mean and flaky uncle, who's been hired by another of the judge's irate courtroom-victims, a crack-addicted M.D., to kill the judge. Caught up in the investigation into the gator-attack and shooting, Kathy matches up professionally and romantically with cool cop Gary Hammond—until a jarring note of raw violence takes out Gary and sets Kathy up for an anticlimactic confrontation with Elvin and the M.D. Nicely realized characters, the usual smart Leonard dialogue, a few moments of brisk high/low humor—but the meandering plot lacks drive, Gibbs rolls around like a loose wheel, and the whole affair seems more like a pale Carl Hiaasen imitation than true-blue Leonard: It's all a big disappointment after Leonard's crackling last, Get Shorty (1990).
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-385-30142-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1991
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
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
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