A promising, often entertaining debut soaked through with Texas flavors.
A closeted local politician, a beautiful college student with serious financial problems, a “fixer” with connections, and a mob goon race for treasure in this tense, Dallas-based novel by Lynch (Babylon 5, 2006, etc.).
College student Allison Kerry is working two summer jobs, struggling to save money for law school and help out her hapless brother and his critically ill son. Her ethics and tenacity are admirable—but when grocery bags containing packs of $100 bills fall off the roof of a blue Suburban and onto her beat-up Volkswagen’s hood, she decides to hold on to it rather than report it or find its rightful owner, despite a cryptic note in one of the bags. How did nearly $750,000 end up on the roof of that SUV? This question briskly sets the plot in motion. The SUV, it turns out, belongs to Bill Garrett, an unscrupulous political fixer who’s committed countless crimes. City councilman Billy Clayton misleads him into believing that they’re both being blackmailed by a giant construction company and that they must pay off another council member to ensure a stadium contract and avoid an intimidating mob enforcer named James Garrelli. But Clayton has a deeper secret: the married Texan likes to step out with men at a bar called Booty Scoot. When Garrelli puts a gun to Clayton’s head, makes him say “I’m a hick who likes dick,” and blackmails him with photos, he knows he needs Garrett’s help. Meanwhile, with the help of a stalwart neighbor, Allison attempts to evade and outwit everyone else. Overall, this story is well-paced with some suspenseful moments that sometimes verge on ludicrous; for example, at one point, an African-American council member calculates “reparations” he’s owed to the penny and demands a bribe of $746,841.03. The principal characters are credible throughout, but the story is marred by some cartoonish figures, such as a hit man who can’t hit straight, a backwoods animal caretaker who names animals after his exes so he’ll enjoy killing them, and a wife addicted to buying heirloom china on eBay.
A promising, often entertaining debut soaked through with Texas flavors.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61296-697-7
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2016
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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