An endearingly ghoulish fantasy sequel that explores unusual territory.
In Ash’s (The One and Only, 2018) fantasy sequel, a vampire heroine defends humanity against a tyrant who’s partially responsible for her existence.
In the year 2029, the bioweapon F8 ran amok, decimating life on Earth. Now it’s 2041, and the vampire Ruby Spencer—whose unique blood allowed her to save humanity in the previous series installment—thrives in Annapolis, Maryland. She and her husband, Clay, work for U.S. President William Unger’s Special Warfare Council and have a 9-year-old daughter named Gabby. Zombies—a result of the mutated ZOM-B virus—have dwindled to controllable numbers, and animal life is on the rebound. One night, a bat enters Ruby and Clay’s bedroom, accompanied by a strange dip in temperature. Afterward, Liora, Queen of Light on the planet Athanasia, makes telepathic contact with Ruby. She explains that Zagan, her home’s King of Darkness, has begun making trips to Earth in various physical forms—including that of a bat. He wants to make humanity the source of blood for his vampire kingdom. However, Zagan doesn’t realize that Ruby is a being called the Tether, who has both his and Liora’s blood flowing through her veins and is potentially “the most powerful vampire in the universe.” Meanwhile, ethically challenged scientist Emory Bradshaw sits in prison, manipulating events and people, including President Unger, to his advantage. In this bold sequel, Ash continues to deliver unexpected elements, such as the crash of a plane without passengers, and a trip to the Eden-like Great Island in New Zealand. To meet the challenge posed by Zagan, Ruby hones new powers of matter manipulation and teleportation. Zagan, who tries to assault Ruby in his castle, is reminiscent of Dracula, and, at one point, he criticizes humanity for “cavalier and wasteful” animal husbandry “with no regard for attaining equilibrium” with the environment. However, despite being 3 million years old, he’s yet to acknowledge that “Intelligence and character are sharper than any dagger,” as Ruby says. The third act requires her to make a heartbreaking sacrifice, although Ash cunningly spares the heroine immortal misery.
An endearingly ghoulish fantasy sequel that explores unusual territory.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73208-164-2
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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