by Glen Larum ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
An excellent book about desperate people carefully depicted in minute detail.
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Larum’s West Texas–based debut novel offers interconnected tales of murder and mayhem.
Indian Springs is a place of cattle ranches and oil rigs. It’s the current home of this novel’s large cast of characters, including Evan Blaine, a talented reporter whom guilt and regret follow like a weather front; brothers Dink and Del Downs, the former an innocent and the latter a career criminal; Omero Valdez, a psychopath whom one character calls “a sly one, like a coyote”; and naïve, young Tony Angione, who’s just passing through while hitchhiking from New Jersey to California. The law is represented by Sheriff Leo Blunt and, the next county over, Sheriff Brent Fulton and their underlings; some of them are truly bad to the bone, such as Chief Deputy Matt Ridgeway. The fates of all these luckless people eventually converge: Valdez kills a motel clerk in a $460 robbery, poor Tony gets picked up by the wrong people, and fugitive Del is caught while on the run. A later jailbreak and a hunt across multiple counties for the escapees will keep readers riveted to the end. Larum had a career as a newspaper editor in the West, and it shows; it’s clear that he knows what the particular emptiness of the region feels like—and he makes readers feel it, too. Each chapter focuses on a particular character; most are short but some not, as when Blaine’s past is explored or when Ridgeway and Deputy Jess Bruce track down the hapless Joe Dornick through mesquite on horseback or when Tony and Dink try to extricate themselves from untenable situations. The denouement is very cleverly handled, and it’s no spoiler to say that at least one major character winds up truly happy.
An excellent book about desperate people carefully depicted in minute detail.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9966865-0-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Walking Three Bar T Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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