A simple tale with a hero who’s just a regular guy, which makes him all the more likable and exemplary.
An agent in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, searching for missing parolees, fears that the Aryan Brotherhood may be responsible for their disappearances in Shaw’s straightforward debut thriller.
When Sam Wellington’s injury in Afghanistan renders him ineligible for re-enlistment in the Army, he gets a job as a correctional officer at San Quentin State Prison in California. It’s a tough gig, and he gladly opts for a parole agent position in nearby Calaveras and Amador counties, even if his predecessor, Lucas Kane, inexplicably disappeared. Sam’s duties seem fairly routine until he promises Jesse Ramirez’s family that he’ll look for the recently missing parolee. Other parolees disappear as well, but it’s the discovery of Kane’s badge that leads Sam to wealthy Felix Tully, who has ties to the Aryan Brotherhood. Sam, after a few run-ins with the Aryan group, whose members include Tully’s brother Hitler, believes he may find answers at Tully’s mansion in the mountains. The author aptly develops his protagonist well before the Calaveras investigation starts. Sam, for example, is an exceptional Army Ranger, but seeing him out of his element at the grueling San Quentin prison establishes him as both tolerant and pragmatic. His down-to-earth status makes the missing persons case even more intimidating and also sets the stage for his inevitable romance with the abrasive Pam Maxant. The no-nonsense Pam, whose cabin Sam rents, works her way into Sam’s investigation, including tagging along to a crime scene because she knows a more efficient route. The tale involves little mystery: Sam doesn’t gather clues or scrutinize evidence, and he has no genuine suspects beyond Tully and his Aryan entourage. But the villains are unquestionably menacing, particularly Hitler and his cohorts, sparking conflict with Sam after one merely brushes up against Sam’s shoulder in passing. The protagonist, meanwhile, makes progress with both the missing parolees and in his relationship with Pam. Lengthy scenes with Sam at a Veterans Affairs Hospital and San Quentin initially seem irrelevant but pay off in the blistering final sequence that allows Sam to use skills he’s picked up along the way. Mystery fans may see the lack of genre elements as a shortcoming, but Shaw keeps the story moving and retains interest with engaging characters.
A simple tale with a hero who’s just a regular guy, which makes him all the more likable and exemplary.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9706798-8-8
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Talahi Media Arts
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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