A powerhouse legal/action thriller—about an alcoholic lawyer defending outlaw bikers charged with murder-one—that roundly reflects the story-telling skills and commercial instincts that first-novelist Freedman evidently developed as director-writer of film and TV melodramas (Kansas City Bomber, Borderline, Night Gallery, etc.). Hero Will Alexander's wry, humane, energetic narration (intercut by action-oriented third-person passages) immediately earns our sympathy for this appealingly flawed 40-year-old: Santa Fe's top defense attorney, twice-divorced father of ten-year-old Claudia, whom he adores, high-strung Will is canned for excess drinking and womanizing by the law firm he founded—and then is told by Claudia's mom that she's moving to Seattle with Claudia. Hard knocks: but cushioned by a headline case that falls into Will's lap, the defense of down-and-dirty biker Lone Wolf and his three comrades, accused of the mutilation-murder of a local drug-dealer—and convicted by the press before trial. Hinging on some weird forensic evidence and on testimony of a whore the bikers raped, the likely outcome of the trial seesaws as the prosecution and Will—sated with self-doubt, drinking, and wenching—razzle-dazzle the jury; but the inevitable verdict comes in: guilty. Months later, however, the whore recants: her testimony was perjured, she claims, extorted by the police. Will, who's meanwhile been caring for Claudia and pursuing a hot affair, turns back to the case—only to see Lone Wolf swept up in a violent prison riot that Will is asked to mediate. And matters become complicated further when a stranger confesses to the crime, calling Will to West Virginia to meet him at a rousing snake-handling religious revival. But it all winds up back in the courtroom—and in a slam-bang ending. Will's incessant self-absorption begins to grate near the end, but, long before, the narrative's storm surge of courtroom duels, gritty crime action, twisty plotting, and technicolor characters has irrevocably swept the reader up in one of the most extravagantly entertaining thrillers of the year.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-84115-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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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