An engaging, light read spiced with Big Easy irreverence.
In Sanchez’s (Exploration’s End, 2018, etc.) third mystery-series installment, thespian and part-time sleuth Jeff Chaussier returns to New Orleans, prepared to marry his fiancee—before their world turns upside down.
Jeff wakes up next to his girlfriend, Bryna, still disoriented after a flight from London following an acting tour. He evidently overindulged in liquid courage during his trans-Atlantic journey—or was he drugged? When the doorbell rings, Bryna heads downstairs and, within moments, someone kidnaps her. Frantic and naked, Jeff runs into the street, but she’s nowhere to be found. He calls the police, but when a rookie cop talks disrespectfully about Bryna, Jeff becomes violent, leading to his arrest. After his release, the distraught hero goes on a lengthy drunken binge that lands him in the hospital. Because Jeff is the narrator of this tale, readers, for better or worse, share his detox experience as well as his recovery with the help of friends in a support group. The section describing Jeff’s delirium offers a visceral portrait of his temporarily tortured psyche, but it also indulges in a lengthy tangent. Finally, healed in body if not quite in soul, Jeff embarks on the journey to rescue Bryana. Fortunately, many people who have his back, including his three brothers, Charley, Space, and BroBoo; New Orleans Police Capt. Ramirez; and other longtime friends. He also gets the protection of a mysterious, powerful family whose daughter and granddaughter he helped return in the previous series installment. Once Jeff gets his mojo back, there’s enough action to keep the narrative interesting, including a few shootouts. The large, diverse, and eccentric cast also provides plenty of amusing entertainment throughout. Although readers will certainly benefit from reading the series in sequence, Sanchez does his due diligence in catching readers up on past events, and as a result, the novel can be enjoyed as a stand-alone. The author ends the story with a surprising cliffhanger, leading fans to the next installment.
An engaging, light read spiced with Big Easy irreverence.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72380-777-0
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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