Solidly written, earnest suspense that isn’t exactly suspenseful, though the family is well-drawn and convincing....
Troy Kirkwood, loving son and devoted single father, disappears without a trace.
Nola, Troy’s mother, is baffled by—and Roy, his father, infuriated at—Detective Lopez’s suggestion that his son abandoned his child Meika, age five, at a Brooklyn Heights movie theater before he vanished. Troy would never do something like that, and Roy thinks he was somehow lured outside. The theater manager confirms this theory: Troy went out to check on his car alarm. But his car disappeared too, and there are no witnesses. Nola does her best to comfort little Meika and to keep Meika’s mother, Cordelia, a recovering crack addict, at bay. When Troy’s body is found, shot in the chest and head, the Kirkwood family nearly falls apart. Cordelia shows up in Family Court, demurely dressed in suit and pearls, and pleads her case to a judge who seems inclined to rule in her favor, even though it’s clear to everyone else that she’s lying. Nola doesn’t know what to do next—the thought of losing her beloved granddaughter to a no-account ex-junkie like Cordelia terrifies her. Vann, her other son, comes up from Atlanta to do some investigating on his own. Meanwhile, Roy blames Detective Lopez for the delays and misunderstandings, and Lopez grows increasingly testy when Roy points out that someone ran up thousands of dollars on Troy’s American Express card—after his death. Looks like a credit-card scam turned into murder. Back at the apartment, Nola just knows that Cordelia is going to be after Troy’s insurance money, not to mention Meika’s Social Security check. Finally, a witness comes forth with a description of a tall man in black leather. The trail will take a few twists and turns before the perps are identified at last.
Solidly written, earnest suspense that isn’t exactly suspenseful, though the family is well-drawn and convincing. Third-novelist Mallette also wrote Shades of Jade (2001).Pub Date: June 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-75744-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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