Despite some flaws, this engaging thriller should appeal to theater folks and New Orleans fans.
A man who returns to his hometown following his father’s untimely death finds passion and peril in this novel.
After receiving the blunt news “Father found dead,” actor Jeff Chaussier heads home—18 hours on a bus for the fearful flyer—to see family and friends and to investigate whether anyone drove his fireman dad to an early grave. Chaussier first visits his best friend, chain-smoking Don, who runs a small theater in the French Quarter in New Orleans. Sparks fly between Chaussier and the theater’s stage manager, Bryna Boudreaux, a feisty, Garbo-featured, blond knockout in a tummy-baring pink T-shirt. Bryna has secrets, and one of them smokes stogies and drives around in a big, black car. Chaussier’s dad also had secrets; after his best friend, Bubber Watkins, “died ugly” in a suspicious fire, he declared that there was “something” he “was going to do something about.” Someone wants to do something about Chaussier too, as he is jumped by two thugs in the French Quarter. Could the attack be linked to the bogus autopsy report on file for his father? In this lively series opener, some pieces of Sanchez’s (A-Roving No More, 2019, etc.) puzzle don’t fit—why, for example, does Chaussier initially suspect his father’s death wasn’t accidental, as a police report claimed? Why didn’t Chaussier go to his dad’s funeral? And why was news of his father’s death sent in a telegram rather than relayed in a phone call? Dated language creeps in; for example, Chaussier says, “I needed to husband my wardrobe.” In addition, deficient editing results in numerous sentences being repeated word for word several pages apart. Hearing Chaussier routinely explain “I’m an actor” grows tiresome but descriptions of the Crescent City seem almost poetic (“New Orleans has no star. She is an ensemble piece”). The author is at his best when depicting the food, the smells, and the buildings and docks of the French Quarter (some readers may even target the Big Easy as their next travel destination).
Despite some flaws, this engaging thriller should appeal to theater folks and New Orleans fans.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-692-26862-9
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Southern Girl Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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