A fresh, snappy, and exhilarating adventure with a recurring hero.
As a hurricane rages, a treasure hunter searches Key West for a cache of drug money tied to his father in this seventh installment of a series.
Though it’s been nearly a decade since his parents’ deaths, Buck Reilly is just now going through their personal effects. He makes a startling discovery: Based on names and places his father, Charles B. Reilly Jr., had documented, Buck surmises he may have been a drug smuggler years before working for the State Department. Charlie had two partners: Frank Graves, who did a 20-year prison stint, and Tommy Diaz, who was murdered by the Medellín cartel. Buck hopes to shed light on his dad’s past by talking to Graves’ ex-wife, Eleanor, and Diaz’s daughter, Jade. They are both in Key West, where Buck also resides. But it turns out an unusual sketch among Charlie’s effects is part of a map to the partners’ drug fortune—and Jade has the other half. The two decide to work together despite the destructive path Hurricane Irma is taking toward Key West. So as locals wisely evacuate, Buck and Jade hunt for hidden cash. But they aren’t the only ones looking, and greed soon ignites a string of potentially lethal double crosses. From the start, Cunningham (Free Fall to Black, 2017, etc.) establishes the story’s uneasy atmosphere as Buck hears reports of ongoing hurricanes. Frequent details on the heavy rain and wind are reminders of the impending storm. The tempest likewise sets an impressive pace, as Buck and Jade have little time before their search area is flooded. The author subtly develops characters as the story progresses; it’s apparent, for example, based on Jade’s behavior, that she’s naturally skeptical of others. Readers will likely guess a few plot turns, but that doesn’t dilute the ever present threat of the hurricane. As in preceding novels, Buck is an admirable protagonist, a man who doesn’t hesitate to tighten the lines of someone else’s secured plane despite increasingly perilous weather.
A fresh, snappy, and exhilarating adventure with a recurring hero.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9987965-3-6
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Greene Street, LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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