When a series of fatal accidents puts America's freight and passenger trains under siege, a Philadelphia-based band of railway buffs decides to investigate while the FBI (in hopes of sidetracking her) assigns a lone, inexperienced agent to the case: a technically competent but woefully predictable thriller from first-novelist Berson. Larry McBryde, a charter member of the Philly Foamers (so- called by impatient Amtrak officials because they almost literally foam at the mouth in their enthusiasm for railroadiana) heads the local transit authority's customer-service department. Concerned that someone might be sabotaging rail lines, he's badgered by fellow members into conducting an inquiry into some suspicious wrecks by fellow club members. Meantime, Jennifer Szczymanski, a rookie FBI agent who's been transferred back to Washington after bringing sexual-harassment charges against her boss in South Dakota, is detailed to look into the smashups. Aboard the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago on what could be its last run, she meets Larry, the unhappily divorced father of a precocious little girl named Melissa. The two hit it off, and Larry, who's figured out that the Lake Shore is the villains' next target, employs his special knowledge to avert a disaster. But circumstantial evidence puts Larry, who's being framed, at the top of her suspects list. They meet again on the Southwest Chief (which quick-witted Larry saves from incineration) and, after exchanging confidences, join forces just before Jennifer's obtuse superiors take him into custody. On the lam together, they reach Denver and hop the California Zephyr, which has a rendezvous with death in a long tunnel through the Rocky Mountains. With help from Jennifer, Larry pulls off another 11th-hour rescue. They then head east for a climactic shootout with the unsurprising bad guys who've kidnapped Melissa to lure them to Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market. A fast ride of a debut along unfamiliar, often exotic, routes to a disappointingly foreseeable destination.
Pub Date: July 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-82586-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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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