A well-paced mystery with an authentic setting and numerous engaging characters.
A young sheriff’s life is complicated by a conflicted girlfriend, a teenage TV star, and a murdered artist in the second book in Rusz’s (The Window Trail, 2019) Big Bend Country Mystery series.
Professor Claire Harp’s 18-year-old brother, Alex Harp, is the star of a television sitcom who’s just about to launch a film career. He’s visiting her in West Texas, accompanied by his friend Piper Robinet, who plays his love interest on the TV show. Alex wants to camp overnight with Piper in Big Bend National Park, but their public relations people soon turn their hike on the South Rim Trail into a media event. Later that night, however, Piper goes missing from the campsite; it soon becomes clear that the circumstances of her disappearance could also help investigators determine who killed an artist some time ago, who’d been painting in the park. Potential perpetrators include drug runners or, closer to home, the artist’s stepdaughter and an ambitious young photographer. Once again, Claire’s boyfriend, the handsome and stalwart Sheriff Clayton Shoot, is seeing the case through by interacting with colorful locals and sorting through various clues with other law enforcement officials. Meanwhile, he and Alex bond at Clayton’s family ranch, where the actor is staying to avoid his fans and members of the press. Clayton’s abrasive older sister, Beatrice, bonds with Alex, too, over their mutual interest in his upcoming starring role in a film production of Romeo and Juliet.
Puzzlingly, Claire has a less active and less sympathetic role in this series entry; in the first, she helped Clayton solve a brutal crime. Here, she wrestles with her mixed emotions about Clayton—he proposed, she refused—and wonders whether to move on in her life as she fields job offers from prestigious publishers and universities. She’s certain that Clayton, who’s now the sheriff of the largest county in Texas, is too deeply invested to ever want to leave it. Their relationship issues thread through the novel, and the author eventually gives Claire an epiphany, only to abruptly undercut it in the book’s last scene—an overly obvious setup for the next book. Claire also spends an inordinate and off-putting amount of time trying to determine if Alex is gay. For the most part, though, the novel is an appealingly nimble, character-driven tale, deepened by the author’s informed, eloquent recreation of the series’ far–West Texas setting, where a switchback is described as “lined by rocks that might have dropped from the moon” and the “sweeping panoramas of distant mountains and flat fields of skeletal bushes” are said to be “freaky, brutal, yet oddly beautiful.” A sighting of a sheeplike “aoudad” may send readers to the encyclopedia. The cast is as diverse as the locale is: Claire, Clayton, Alex, and Piper are among the white characters; Piper’s boyfriend, Tyler Tribble, and Chief Ranger Velma Furcron are African-American; a minor teenage character named Gracie Allen Yazzie is Navajo; and Clayton’s deputy, Alonso Rangel, is Hispanic.
A well-paced mystery with an authentic setting and numerous engaging characters.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-69478-366-0
Page Count: 273
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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