A grim but steadily suspenseful novel.
A young boy’s kidnapping affects the lives of his family members and an investigating detective in Holborn’s (The Roadrunner, 2017, etc.) thriller.
Eight-year-old Gabriel Wheeler’s home life in the town of Fenny is less than ideal. His mother, Celine, is an alcoholic, and she and her professional Elvis-impersonator boyfriend largely neglect him. He’s determined to play his role in his elementary school’s Winter Extravaganza, so he braves a trek through a raging blizzard alone. At the school, a man named Willard Crawley kidnaps the meek boy without any other adults noticing. Detective Harvey Sam leads an extensive search for the child, but he’s distracted by the sudden departure of his girlfriend, Pam, who took his beloved stepdaughter, Effie, with her. After years of isolation in a house in the woods, Willard is mentally unsound and often sees visions of his brother, Terrance, who died as an infant. He also believes that Gabriel is his late brother and seems intent on keeping the boy close. Next door is a woman named Chase Solomon who’s maintaining a low profile due to a warrant for marijuana possession and bail jumping. She has a chance to help Gabriel, but at the risk of her own freedom. Holborn’s story is dark but gripping. Willard is an unquestionably scary, well-established villain, and Gabriel is a sympathetic victim whose safety is always in question. Most of the characters are unlikable, but Celine’s deplorable apathy is particularly fascinating; she seems to care most about garnering sympathy and convincing others that Harvey is “useless.” Chase, who first appears in the book’s second half, shines as the reluctant good Samaritan. She proves to be even more interesting in the book’s “bonus sequel”—a Chase-starring short crime story, “The Roadrunner,” which involves a potential romance and cute puppies.
A grim but steadily suspenseful novel.Pub Date: June 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9919536-3-9
Page Count: 259
Publisher: Ferndale Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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