Another well-written mystery featuring murders and secrets in a harsh, haunting landscape.
In this third volume in a series, a Nebraska attorney with psychic abilities investigates some old murders, putting herself and others in danger.
Megan Docket considers herself a magnet for trouble. Though not yet 30, she’s managed to kick a few hornets’ nests, not to mention she’s “killed three men in three years.” She had good reasons, but the memories disturb her. Four months pregnant and reconciled with her husband, Brian, she’s not planning on more trouble, but newly recovered evidence stirs up the decades-old disappearance of three women and a subsequent house fire. No bodies were ever found, but a man was convicted, who admitted to arson but not murder. Walking the property where the house once stood, Megan hears voices in the wind, a special ability she possesses. Unbearable, agonizing wails of two women tell her that she must investigate and that the third woman didn’t die at the scene. But when Megan looks into several fishy matters, she’s strongly warned to back off—as when her horse is shot and killed. Brian wants her to drop it, but he can’t influence her; that, and other tensions, threaten their marriage. Megan draws on her close network of friends and relatives for support, and though she unravels several lingering mysteries, finding the truth comes at a very high cost. Bruce (Alone in the Wind, 2016, etc.) again offers a tight, nicely observed mystery with thriller and paranormal elements, continuing to develop relationships from the first two novels. She handles Megan and Brian’s marriage problems with great sensitivity to both points of view, and Megan’s bulldog inability to let things go becomes central to the plot, a good tie-in. Bruce also brings in the paranormal aspect with subtlety; Megan’s insights provide her with important clues, but her ability isn’t overmined for plot convenience. The plot, with multiple interrelating characters and events from both now and 20 years ago, can get a little confusing, but Bruce does a fairly good job of keeping the reader oriented.
Another well-written mystery featuring murders and secrets in a harsh, haunting landscape.Pub Date: July 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-57638-522-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Merriam Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2016
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
