Not as stark as the work of Walter Mosley, but Dickey’s novel embraces its noir influences.
Two minutes is long enough to save a life—or end it, as a desperate husband finds out when he takes to a life of crime.
Dickey (Resurrecting Midnight, 2009, etc.) starts this bleak tale of a robbery gone wrong with a bang. “Sometimes the only choices a man had left were bad ones,” says Dmytryk Knight, a former white-collar executive at a Detroit automaker. Eventually, Knight gets to telling us the circumstances that put him in a room with a hardened criminal named, weirdly enough, after the main character in George V. Higgins's seminal crime novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle. But first, Dickey puts his man on the run. Dmytryk is introduced in the midst of an L.A. bank robbery straight out of Heat, and he watches in horror as a wounded guard blows away his partners in crime. Yet it’s obvious from the start that Knight is a different kind of desperado. “John Dillinger,” he muses. “That criminal knew there were only two ways to get money in the land of free enterprise: you earned it, or you took it at gunpoint. That was about as American as a man could get in the land of red, white, and the blues. Dillinger wasn’t my American hero.” Knight’s reason for being is his estranged wife Cora, who took to exotic dancing to make ends meet before encouraging her husband to get into a dirtier business. After an ill-advised liaison with a dead man’s mistress, Dmytryk flees for the South, hoping to escape his dire straits and finally reunite with Cora. But as Knight learns, trouble is hard to shake.
Not as stark as the work of Walter Mosley, but Dickey’s novel embraces its noir influences.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-525-95058-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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
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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