An often diverting story of memorable characters hunting treasure.
An estranged couple’s dispute over one member’s potentially valuable heirloom turns deadly in Mills’ (Pineland Gold, 2017, etc.) thriller.
In 1910, Jim McKenzie, needing funds for daughter Sarah’s tuberculosis treatment, steals a gold cross from a drunken Cuban captain. Unable to get back to his family in time to help his child, Jim buries the cross on Cayo Costa Island, specifying its location in a letter to his wife, Claire. More than a century later, Lynn Chapman owns that letter, which Jim’s ancestors have passed down. Evidently, a hurricane had covered the burial site for the cross, preventing Claire from retrieving it. That certainly didn’t stop Lynn’s soon-to-be ex-husband, Bobby, from looking. He now feels entitled to some of the cross’s estimated million-dollar value, as his search cost most of his inheritance money. When Bobby subsequently finds a way to clear the area where the cross is located, Lynn fears he’ll get his hands on the antique. So she seeks help from private investigator, former cop, and boat owner Doug Shearer. The two head to the island with hopes of reaching the cross first. Unluckily, Bobby is already there and, armed with a weaponized drone, isn’t willing to give up what he believes is rightfully his. Straightforward characters populate Mills’ tale, the latest in his Pine Island Sound Mystery series. Bobby, for example, is the unmitigated villain, his anger so sharp and frequent that he antagonizes his own divorce lawyer. But backstory for nearly every individual adds interest: Readers learn what Lynn originally saw in Bobby, while Bobby’s pitiful childhood may explain his unsavory present-day behavior. The narrative spotlights supporting characters as well, like Lynn’s genial attorney, Beth Mancini. Recurrent stories from Beth’s lawyer boyfriend, Frank Powers, about one of his cases, though curious (a judge is the defendant in a “sex trial”), generally come across as tangents. The book’s latter half, however, stays on track, as Bobby menaces Lynn and Doug, and Mills amply details their time on the breezy island.
An often diverting story of memorable characters hunting treasure.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-70210-485-2
Page Count: 217
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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