Alternately violent and tender, with a gently legendary quality that makes this tall tale just about perfect.
If the Coen brothers’ film version of True Grit gave readers an appetite for more underage period Western bounty hunting, Lansdale (Edge of Dark Water, 2012, etc.) is eager to oblige.
“[O]ne thing for sure, this ain’t your day,” the retiring deputy of Sylvester, Texas, tells Jack Parker. He doesn’t know the half of it. After Jack’s parents are carried off by smallpox, his grandfather packs Jack, 16, and his sister, Lula, 14, onto a wagon and heads for their Aunt Tessle’s in Kansas. The wagon makes it only halfway across the Sabine River on a suspiciously expensive new ferry when three men spoiling for a fight shoot Caleb Parker and the ferryman, leave Jack in the river and ride off with Lula. Jack’s obligation to rescue his sister is clear, but the means aren’t, until he runs into tracker Eustace Cox—part black, part Comanche, and maybe a hint of Parker mixed up in him—and his buddy Reginald Jones, a philosophical dwarf everyone calls Shorty. Offering to swap the deeds for his family’s land for some timely assistance in dealing with "Cut Throat Bill," "Nigger Pete" and "Fatty Worth," Jack interests the unlikely pair in his quest. Soon enough, they’re joined by Jimmie Sue, a whore with a heart of flesh; Winton, ex-rancher, ex–bounty hunter and ex-sheriff; Spot, his assistant back in the Sylvester jail; and Hog, Eustace’s hog. The many shaggy conversations, anecdotes and back stories that emerge among the group gradually reveal to Jack what he’s going to have to do to rescue Lula, what sort of allies he’s enlisted for the job and what sort of person he is himself.
Alternately violent and tender, with a gently legendary quality that makes this tall tale just about perfect.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-18845-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
For once Deaver takes more effort to establish his hero’s bona fides than to give him a compelling and logical plot. The...
Veteran thrillmeister Deaver kicks off a new series about a man who collects rewards for a living.
Don’t call Colter Shaw a private eye, or a freelance investigator, or even a soldier of fortune, though his job includes elements of all three. The son of a cranky survivalist who died years ago amid suspicious circumstances, light-footed Shaw has returned close to his childhood home in the Bay Area in the hope of claiming the $10,000 Frank Mulliner is offering for the return of his daughter, Sophie, a college student who stormed out after the two of them fought over the FOR SALE sign outside his house and hasn’t been seen since. Shaw, who has the cool-headed but irritating habit of calculating the numerical odds on every possibility, thinks there’s a 60 percent chance that Sophie’s dead, “murdered by a serial killer, rapist or a gang wannabe.” Even though he accepts rewards only for rescues, not recoveries, he begins sorting through the scant evidence, quickly gets a hot lead about Sophie’s fate, and just as quickly realizes that Detective Dan Wiley, of the Joint Major Crimes Task Force, should have followed exactly the same clues days ago. (The rapidly shifting relations between Shaw and the law, in fact, are a particular high point here.) The day after Shaw’s search for Sophie comes to a violent end, he’s already, in the time-honored manner of Deaver’s bulldog heroes (The Burial Hour, 2017, etc.), on the trail of a second abduction, that of LGBT activist Henry Thompson. Readers who haven’t skipped the prologue will know that still a third kidnap victim, very pregnant Elizabeth Chabelle, will need to be rescued the following day. Thompson’s grief-stricken partner, Brian Byrd, tells Shaw, “It’s like this guy’s playing some goddamn sick game”—a remark Deaver’s fans will know to give just as much weight as Shaw himself does.
For once Deaver takes more effort to establish his hero’s bona fides than to give him a compelling and logical plot. The results are subpar for this initial installment but more encouraging for the promised series.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53594-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
A gritty, complicated heroine like Flora Dane deserves a better plot than this needlessly complicated story.
A kidnapping survivor–turned-vigilante tries to save another young woman while the police do everything they can to save them both.
Flora Dane might look unscathed but she’s permanently scarred from having been abducted while on spring break in Florida seven years earlier by Jacob Ness, a sadistic trucker who held her captive for 472 days, keeping her in a coffin for much of the time when he wasn't forcing her to have sex with him. Now back in Boston and schooled in self-defense, Flora is obsessed with kidnapped girls and the nature of survival, a topic she touches on a bit more than necessary in the many flashbacks to her time in captivity. Gardner (Crash & Burn, 2015, etc.) must walk a fine line in accurately evoking the horrors of Flora’s past ordeals without slipping into excessive descriptions of violence; she is not entirely successful. When Flora thwarts another kidnapping attempt by killing Devon Goulding, her would-be abductor, Gardner regular Sgt. Detective D.D. Warren’s interest is piqued even though she’s meant to be on restricted duty. Then Flora disappears for real, and Warren, along with Dr. Samuel Keynes, the FBI victim specialist from Flora's original kidnapping, fears it’s related to the kidnapping three months earlier of Stacey Summers, a case Flora followed closely. Gardner alternates between Warren’s investigation into Flora’s disappearance and Flora’s present-day hell at the hands of a new enemy, but the implausibility of the sheer number of kidnappings, among other things, strains credulity.
A gritty, complicated heroine like Flora Dane deserves a better plot than this needlessly complicated story.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-95457-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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