A promising thriller about a famous serial killer in which the suspense prematurely dissipates.
A novel offers a new perspective on one of history’s most notorious figures.
This 19th-century tale starts innocently enough with two Malay boys, lonely rich kid Maurice and Mawken, the poor local boy he befriends. At first, Maurice educates the illiterate Mawken, who in turn gives him advice. But as Maurice grows up, he yearns to strike out on his own and to leave Mawken behind. Before that can happen, the two end up on the run after the mysterious murders of their parents, supposedly by pirates and witnessed only by Mawken. The two find work on a cargo ship, with Maurice as a cook and Mawken as a crew member. Partway through the journey, Maurice witnesses Mawken kill the ship’s brutal captain, but he stupidly picks up the murder weapon and is blamed for the crime by his fellow crewmates. Luckily, a storm severely damages the ship and Maurice is briefly free of his past. Then Mawken shows up again, and death follows him, with the kindly but weak-willed Maurice unable to escape his dangerous friend: “There was no question or indication I had any recourse but to follow his plan. It was as if he made the decisions and I meekly followed.” Maurice is the unfortunate observer of a series of gruesome murders of women, first in Austin, Texas, and later in the slums of London, which leads to the Jack the Ripper mythos. The strength of Lee’s (Aquasaurus, 2016, etc.) intriguing second novel is the well-researched, vivid passages describing life aboard a cargo ship and in 19th-century Austin and London. The narrative moves along swimmingly in those parts. But the author tips his twist ending way too soon. In addition, anyone who gets close to Maurice tends to disappear quickly, sometimes permanently, while Mawken prefers to stay in the shadows (“I am not seen if I don’t want to be seen”). This means there isn’t much of a cast to experience other than the two polar-opposite main characters. The key question that remains is how long will it take Maurice to realize what readers already have.
A promising thriller about a famous serial killer in which the suspense prematurely dissipates.Pub Date: July 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9971284-8-2
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Aim-Hi Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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