An undemanding murder story reinforced by superlative characters who need not even leave the bar.
Members of a Pennsylvania social club find themselves at risk when a motorcycle gang rides into town in search of a sizable stash in this thriller.
Two bikers walking into the Italian-American Club in Oxton definitely stand out. Bartender Kimmy can serve only club members and signed-in guests. Furthermore, the men, looking for just-out-of-prison Pasquale “Pazz” Vukovic, belligerently demand drinks before finally leaving. Pazz, as it happens, using information from his dying cellmate, is after loot reputedly hidden somewhere in the club. Around the same time, Speedy, having recently lost his job as a maintenance man, inadvertently trips the club’s alarm early one morning. Joe Lorenzo, editor-reporter of a local weekly, thinks Speedy was the inside man for an attempted break-in. Things get more suspicious when Speedy turns up in a creek with a bullet hole in his head. Convinced the cops aren’t interested in solving the murder, Joe, a former investigative reporter, starts his own probe. Complicating matters is another bartender, Tracy, who’s harassed by both her pre-prison boyfriend, Pazz, and rich ex Derek. There are also those bikers, the Death Dealers, four in all, who’ve been frequenting bars in the area, asking about Pazz. Murders, meanwhile, continue, making it abundantly clear that someone’s willing to kill to get what he or she wants. Business author Cox’s (Hanging Fire, 2014, etc.) first foray into thriller territory is surprisingly lighthearted, notwithstanding spurts of violence; readers witness at least one shooting that’s chilling in its terseness. The characters and club setting, however, are so richly detailed that they feel warmly familiar. Moments like patrons at the bar with piles of cash in front of them (to avoid “fumbling with wallets”) are comical high points. The mystery is minimal, with just one truly unknown element—whether or not the dough is actually in the club. But trepidation in the final act is thoroughly elevated, putting several lives, including Joe’s, in peril. There are far too many excellent, well-rounded characters to list, all with their personal back stories. But Joe’s potential love interest, Annette, is memorable, caring for her dementia-ridden mother with no help from her sister Darbie, who revels in telling everyone her sibling’s probably a lesbian.
An undemanding murder story reinforced by superlative characters who need not even leave the bar.Pub Date: March 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5305-9919-6
Page Count: 294
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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