A meandering cowboy tale.
A rugged ranch hand shakes up life in a quiet Montana town in this novel.
Lance Turbyfill is a 51-year-old outdoorsman hoping to make a new start—things have gone south in Winnemucca, Nevada, where he lived with a disabled, surly friend and his beautiful wife. He takes a job at the Oliver Ranch in Rusty Springs, Montana, where Joy Ann Oliver and her friends (especially Stormy Smith, a single woman desperate to find a man) impatiently await his arrival. Slowly, Lance begins to settle into his new life—he explores the wild hills around the ranch; treats one of his visiting paramours, a glamorous woman named Ferris, to dancing and a buffet; and briefly gets involved with Stormy. Meanwhile, Joy Ann’s husband, Larry, catches wind that the troublemaking Hicks family has returned to Rusty Springs and he grows vengeful; the clan once planted a bomb in the Olivers’ mailbox. Lance leaves for something called The Gathering, where he reunites with his Nevada friends and becomes smitten with a woman named Alexis, who helps him work through his lingering Vietnam War trauma. He brings Alexis back to the ranch, but she soon tells him she must leave. Then a record-setting heat wave rolls through the area, sparking massive wildfires that throw the whole town into crisis and set off a chain of events that mobilize Lance, the Olivers, and all their friends to protect their town from the conflagration and the nefarious Hicks family. Bender (Lebensborn Secrets, 2017, etc.) tells this tale with an appealing folksiness and shows an especially deft hand for simile: a building in the story “had so many additions that it looked like a mother duck folding her wings over a flock of rambling ducklings.” But the plot is scattered and uneven. Some of the narrative threads, including one involving a red-haired woman who abandons a mountain cabin, lead nowhere; the Gathering that Lance goes to, whose purpose is “to foster worldwide peace, cooperation, and spiritual healing,” is a bewildering digression. And while kidnappings, near-death experiences, and the mighty, destructive forces of nature befall the protagonists, they resolve these problems without any real struggle or dramatic tension.
A meandering cowboy tale.Pub Date: April 27, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Bender Associates
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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