A lively thriller with plenty of unexpected developments.
In this prequel to Cunningham’s (Maroon Rising, 2015, etc.) adventure series, a treasure hunter’s quick rise to fame and wealth takes a nose dive, due to circumstances involving deceit and murder.
By 2006, Buck Reilly’s treasure-hunting company, e-Antiquity, which he co-founded and owns with Jack Dodson, has enjoyed its share of success. But when Buck finds a Serpent King’s tomb, filled with numerous artifacts, in the former Mayan city of El Mirador, it causes his company’s stock to skyrocket. This is accompanied by lavish media attention, primarily aimed at Buck, in part due to his relationship with supermodel Heather Drake. Their honeymoon in the British Virgin Islands, however, is ruined when Buck ends up wrongfully jailed for murder. He narrowly avoids a conviction, but the damage, it seems, is done. The company’s stock drops, and the public revels in reports that Buck’s latest archaeological sites are turning up nothing. This puts a strain on both his marriage and his relationship with Jack, who’s handling the company’s financial side. Soon, Interpol and the FBI are knocking on e-Antiquity’s doors, accusing Buck of all sorts of other crimes. Cunningham’s zigzagging plot is invigorating, as Buck faces a range of threats, from potential arrest to an estranged wife. A few of the plot turns are predictable, even for readers who may be new to the series, but most prove to be genuinely surprising. The author’s confident narrative voice adds weight to the narrative, whether the mood is light (Buck and Heather “making a dedicated effort to flatten out the lumpy mattress”) or baleful (“The bright light of reality made me wince,” notes Buck as he faces possible charges). Many secondary characters are multilayered, as well, such as the shrewd, professional research partner Scarlet Roberson and Buck’s underhanded, meticulous betrayer.
A lively thriller with plenty of unexpected developments.Pub Date: March 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9987965-0-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Greene Street, LLC
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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