Different time period, but the message is still the same and as bleak as Peckinpah’s: Even a world of thieves needs...
Blake makes a small leap from the grotesquely amusing Roaring Twenties’ crime-spree scene in A World of Thieves (2002), switching to Depression-era Texas with a Tex-Mex cast.
Mexico’s in mid-Revolution in 1914, and gunfire in Juàrez can be heard across the Rio Grande at Mrs. O’Malley’s whorehouse in El Paso, when Pancho Villa himself comes to bed his choice gringo, the freckled Irish redhead Megan. He comes with Rodolfo Fierro, who just that day has killed 300 Federal prisoners before coming to Mrs. O’Malley’s. Something fiery about Fierro causes his whore, Spooky Ava (real name: Ella), to remove her pessary and go for love. Pregnant, she marries rancher Cullen Youngblood and gives birth to James Rudolph Youngblood. Our only hint about her past is that she was once thought crazy. On New Year’s Eve 1936, we meet Jimmy, now 21, in the Free State of Galveston, the nation’s most wide-open gambling city, and, as we meet Jimmy the Kid, who has graveyard eyes, he’s driving an ice pick into Willie Rags’s heart. Jimmy’s an enforcer, bagman, and bodyguard for Rose and Sam Maceo, who suck up all the gambling profits on the island and in Galveston County, and Willie Rags worked for foolish folk trying to muscle in on Maceo territory. Sam does the glad-handing and charitable handouts for public welfare, and Rose is the strong-arm, assisted by his Ghosts, who also help keep the local crime rate down. Jimmy is Rose’s personal bodyguard, at times assisted by fellow Ghosts Raymond Brando (not Don Corleone but a great mimic) and LQ (from Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country). Rags’s rival mob in Houston wants its slots back. Bloody business affairs follow. Then Jimmy meets skin-tingling Daniela Zarate, whom he dives into Mexico to save.
Different time period, but the message is still the same and as bleak as Peckinpah’s: Even a world of thieves needs rules—and loyalty.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-380-97751-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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