A detective story whose imperfect protagonist boasts endearing qualities just below his rakish exterior.
A former CIA agent tries to prove a dead war hero isn’t actually dead and runs afoul of a private security company that may want to silence him in this thriller.
Max Bowman hasn’t worked for the CIA in years, but his old employers still throw the occasional job his way. The latest is Gen. Donald Davidson, who hires Max to find his son, 1st Lt. Robert Davidson. News outlets from a decade ago reported that Robert died in Afghanistan, but an unnamed source has told the general that his son’s alive. Max is inclined to agree, especially after Robert’s sister, Angela, apparently desperate that Max not take the case, sends teenage son Jeremy to scare him off. And Max is surely making someone else nervous: before he can question a retired colonel, an SUV smashes into Max’s rental car and the colonel’s house explodes. Robert, it seems, had an association with a private military organization called Dark Sky. One of the company’s operatives, taking on actor Chuck Connors’ persona in The Rifleman, is gunning for Max, as well as anyone who may have pertinent information relating to Robert. Max teams up with Jeremy, who wants to help his grandfather, and they head to a Dark Sky training facility in Montana, hoping to find answers—if they can survive long enough. The decidedly unlikable protagonist will grow on readers. He’s undeniably gruff; his first-person narrative remains relentlessly sarcastic and insists on detailing bathroom excursions. Max’s bluntness, however, makes him the story’s most honest character—and most reliable, since he’s surrounded by people either lying or hiding something. His unsentimental relationship with girlfriend Jules, too, is more believable than most: their repeated phone conversations consist of Jules’ loud curses in lieu of sweet nothings. There’s not much mystery but definitely suspense, with the Rifleman-lookalike putting Max, Jeremy, and maybe a few others in unmistakable peril. Canfield (co-author of What’s Driving You???, 2015) likewise supplements his genre piece with a profound theme of fatherhood. Max and Jeremy take a detour to see the teen’s estranged dad, while the candid narrator ultimately reveals why his two daughters hate him.
A detective story whose imperfect protagonist boasts endearing qualities just below his rakish exterior.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9975707-1-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
