Keith Moody's lucky year just might be 1941. He's plucked from the ranks of B-western screenwriters at Empire Studios and promised a prestige assignment on a new war film—if only he can persuade Russell Keys, the flying ace who just happens to be his cousin, to sign the rights to his life's story over to Empire. Fat chance, thinks Moody, who's never gotten along with Russell. But Russell signs without a murmur, and Moody starts finding out just how bad 1941 can be. Item: Russell's Thunderbolt crashes in a Kansas field, with no sign of the pilot, throwing the fate of China Skies into doubt. Item: unsavory Tony White demands a $50,000 blackmail for keeping secret about the ace's relationship with a murdered dwarf prostitute in China—news that could send China Skies into the deep freeze. Items: After a routine payoff, Tony gets himself killed just outside Moody's view; then the detective Moody's put on the case gets killed; then Tony's killer gets killed, along with his wife; then three more people get killed, two of them as Moody watches. Through it all, seedy Empire head Marvin Margolis plots around each new wrinkle with devious obtuseness to keep the production afloat, even when his leads join the endangered list. This first mystery from Matthews (The Wisdom of Stones, 1994, etc.) has a bouncy way with studio types, from self- promoting stars to nubile researchers, that keeps the parade moving along smartly till the halfway point, when cast members start to arm themselves and blast away at each other as indiscriminately as postal employees.
Pub Date: Aug. 27, 1997
ISBN: 0-8027-3303-4
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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
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
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