A historical thriller enriched by characters who sparkle and refuse to be forgotten.
A college student’s work as a confidential informant puts her dangerously close to a radical group with sinister plans in this novel.
Mary Jane Bailey’s freshman year at Cal State Long Beach in 1968 doesn’t involve the typical campus activities one might expect. Not long after her registration, a federal agency asks her to be an informant in order to infiltrate a group known as Burn It Down. Shortly thereafter, she witnesses masked individuals attack one of her handlers, Terry Griswald, a local detective. Jane furthermore encounters enigmatic Thaddeus Blank, who indirectly threatens her by brandishing a straight razor in plain sight and demands details on any BID reports she gives to the cops. Jane has a way into BID with classmate Maggie Molyneaux, who soon introduces her to Junior Higgins, the apparent leader. Including other female members, the BID “family” appears to be a batch of harmless, peace-loving hippies. But it’s evident that Junior is concocting something devious which involves Jane, whether she’s a willing participant or not. With help from Terry and fellow student Rider, Jane tries to decipher what exactly Junior’s ultimate objective is while dodging—or outright confronting—the occasional assailant. Preston’s (Crashpad, 2017, etc.) story is a fairly straightforward mystery; villains are generally pronounced, and even Junior’s scheme isn’t surprising. But the characters are a lively, extraordinary assortment. Jane, for starters, is a remarkable protagonist, unfazed by facing multiple baddies with a two-by-four or just her purse. Others stand out via their discernible shortcomings: Blank is shaken by Jane’s lack of intimidation when he sports his straight razor, and unassertive Terry wonders whether she set him up for the attack. The story thoroughly embodies the ’60s era, both its anti-war sentiments and pop culture. The decade is also humorously portrayed through Blank’s largely failed attempts at using slang; at one point, he confuses Jane by referencing already-outmoded “sock hops.”
A historical thriller enriched by characters who sparkle and refuse to be forgotten.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9911516-6-0
Page Count: 171
Publisher: Rendrag Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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