An engrossing page-turner, and though some might find its characters a bit too familiar, Luna’s penchant for plot twists...
In Luna’s science fiction action thriller, a heroic astronaut must rescue his crew and his save his mission from a sinister conspiracy.
The near-future world of the novel sees man walking on Mars, but the planet’s role to play with humanity depends on Cmdr. Matthew “Mac” MacTavish and the crew of the spaceship Mars 2. Mac’s team of scientists and engineers must build a sustainable habitat on Mars, prepare it for the imminent arrival of Mars 3, along with a new group of astronauts, and then, hopefully, a perpetual influx of pioneers. But during their final days on the red planet, Mac’s team suddenly loses contact with Earth and Mars 3. Dr. Boyle, the crew’s pompous scientific lead, believes the spaceship, as well as everyone on Earth, has been killed by a massive solar flare. While Mac decides how to handle this catastrophe, Mars 3 unexpectedly lands near the team’s base. Mac struggles to solve this riddle, but his investigation only yields more questions, with every sliver of truth placing Mac and his crew deeper in danger. The book continues on a hydra-headed path for the duration of the story, making it compulsively engaging. As Dr. Boyle constantly reiterates, the truth is bigger than Mac can imagine. To service his plot, Luna’s characters are drawn from tried-and-true molds and travel through the book on predictable arcs. Dr. Boyle, unsurprisingly, emerges as the story’s key antagonist and grandstands like a true Bond villain. He is the perfect foil to the heroically square-jawed and straight-laced Mac, who leads his team with paternal care. Luna makes a point of highlighting Mac’s relationship with the rest of his team, immersing the reader in their camaraderie. This turns out to be an important aspect, as it gives the story a real sense of danger. Though these characters, on their own, are not necessarily special, the relationships among them are—and it hurts when Luna severs them.
An engrossing page-turner, and though some might find its characters a bit too familiar, Luna’s penchant for plot twists provide an ultimately satisfying read.Pub Date: May 31, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615464657
Page Count: 279
Publisher: Gravity Bay
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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