Serial-kidnapper psychodrama set in the privileged precincts of the very wealthy, by the ever assured Farris (Dragonfly, 1995, etc.), a master of pitch-perfect dialogue be it backcountry or Manhattan art world. Some suspense novelists, like Farris and Dean Koontz, have such density of knowledge about the physical world that entertaining trash becomes brilliantly real. Photographic sentences dwell on extreme sensations and thoughts, as well as on the obsessive musings of those who know too much about ``the dynamics of hell'' and about the moment when horror overwhelms one and ``images of sublime beauty [become] thorns in the eye, great music discordant, and innocent laughter [raises] blisters on the heart.'' Here, six women, all with singular physical flaws, have disappeared without a trace. All of them knew charismatic, wealthy architect Dix Trevellian, and Coleman Dane of the Justice Department thinks Trevellian has murdered all six, including his own beautiful sister, Felicia Dane, who was partly crippled. Dix, though, has passed a polygraph test. Is the killer then Dix's schizo brother Scott, who carries on imaginary conversations with all of the lost victims? Or perhaps psycho Dempsey Wingo, made murderous with jealousy by his ex-wife, Dix's sister Esther? And what about Esther, the billionaire sister from hell and her semi-incestuous three-way bed frolics with Dix? Dane hires West Point grad, ex-CID, and Military Police officer Sharon Norbeth (daughter of a Medal of Honor winner), now retired on a pension but still a first-class sleuth, to investigate, hoping that her prosthetic hand will lure the kidnapper. Sharon is also a talented if quirky painter, and Dane has a top Manhattan art dealer set up a show for her that will attract the vanisher. Will Sharon wind up sandwiched between Esther and Dix, before disappearing? Like the summer's action flicks: marvelous visuals, little substance.
Pub Date: July 23, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-85375-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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