An entertaining mystery romp.
Hard-boiled ex-cop Candace “CW” McCoy tries to keep her cool as she solves a case of embezzlement, kidnapping, and murder in the Florida heat.
Widmer (The Spirit of Swiftwater, 1998) makes his first foray into fiction with this introduction of CW McCoy. A former cop, CW—don’t call her Candy—left the force after a disastrous shooting gone awry and the end of her marriage. She moved to the beach town of Spanish Point, Florida, and has started a second career as a realtor. However, her attempts at a quieter life are shaken up by the appearance of Bobby Lee Darby, a fugitive hedge fund manager who has faked his own death after bilking his investors out of millions. Darby claims his innocence and asks CW to help him prove it, but when she balks, he kidnaps her ailing grandfather and forces her hand. Now, she must face her worst fears and dive back into the investigative business, relying on old friends to help her find her grandfather and solve the case as it grows more and more complicated—and deadly. Widmer has a great sense of place; he easily brings the town of Spanish Point and its colorful cast of characters to life. CW is a great character—a noir detective trying to outrun her own past, suffering no fools along the way. She also has a few potential love interests that pop up, men who truly seem to admire her impulsive toughness. Some of the dialogue is a little contrived, though, as CW says too many lines like “My Nana used to tell me I had a mouth” that seem straight out of a Bogart movie. Also, at the novel’s end, a few too many loose ends of CW’s personal story remain untied, though that leaves room for more volumes in the series. Hopefully there’s a bit more resolution in store.
An entertaining mystery romp.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9964987-0-8
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Allusion Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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