Not the best month for country-music sensation Dakota Jones: Somebody's been sending her threatening letters and unsolicited subscriptions to Seventeen and Prison Life; somebody's upstaged her Memphis concert with a flash grenade; somebody's killed singer Joni Ames, leaving a note on the body, ``NOW WE'RE EVEN, DAKOTA.'' (Still on the horizon: a dropped spotlight that nearly crushes Dakota, and a batch of cookies like mama never made.) And that's not all: The day after the murder, both Dakota's long-lost cousin Hope Delaney and the father who abandoned her as a baby turn up on her doorstep and want into Dakota's mÇnage. Luckily, Sacramento p.i. Kat Colorado, an old friend of Dakota's whose shingle ought to read ``MENACED INNOCENTS OUR SPECIALTY,'' is on the job, spiriting her off to hiding, taking a jaundiced look at her poor relations, and pointing the finger by turns at Dakota's abusive ex, her double-talking manager, and the lover who's two- timing her with sloe-eyed little Hope. From early on, Kat and Dakota are both so maddeningly sententious—``You help people rewrite their lives, Katy,'' Dakota tells Kat, who weighs in with gems like ``Truth is rarely easy, I think. And almost always a double-edged sword''—that you just want to shake them; but once the omnithreatening characters take over, the story takes off. So Kat's seventh is better than her recent cases (Alley Kat Blues, 1995, etc.), though still not up to 1992's Copy Kat. (Mystery Guild alternate selection; author tour)
Pub Date: June 4, 1996
ISBN: 0-399-14133-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
Looks like Neal Carey, the peripatetic agent of that free- lance justice troop Friends of the Family, will never get back to New York to write his dissertation on Tobias Smollett. This time he's sprung from three years in a Chinese monastery (The Trail to Buddha's Mirror, 1992) only to be sent undercover as a ranch-hand in the Nevada plains to scout out the Sons of Seth, a white- supremacist flock that's his best hope for locating two-year-old Cody McCall, snatched from his Hollywood mother during a paternal weekend. Neal settles in deep, of course, and his ritual ordeals- -having to sell out the rancher who took him in, breaking off his romance with tough schoolmarm Karen Hawley, going up against rotten-apple Cal Strekker, getting ordered to kill his Friendly mentor Joe Graham—are as predictable as the trademark dose of mysticism as the bodies pile up, and as the certainty that when the dust settles, Neal won't be back at school. Winslow's Aryan crazies don't have the threatening solidity of Stephen Greenleaf's (Southern Cross, p. 1102 ), but Neal's latest adventure is full of entertaining derring-do.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09934-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
O'Brien proves to be the Oliver Stone of literature, reiterating the same Vietnam stories endlessly without adding any insight. Politician John Wade has just lost an election, and he and his wife, Kathy, have retired to a lakeside cabin to plan their future when she suddenly disappears. O'Brien manages to stretch out this simple premise by sticking in chapters consisting of quotes from various sources (both actual and fictional) that relate to John and Kathy. An unnamed author — an irritating device that recalls the better-handled but still imperfect "Tim O'Brien" narrator of The Things They Carried (1990) — also includes lengthy footnotes about his own experiences in Vietnam. While the sections covering John in the third person are dry, these first-person footnotes are unbearable. O'Brien uses a coy tone (it's as though he's constantly whispering "Ooooh, spooky!"), but there is no suspense: The reader is acquainted with Kathy for only a few pages before her disappearance, so it's impossible to work up any interest in her fate. The same could be said of John, even though he is the focus of the book. Flashbacks and quotes reveal that John was present at the infamous Thuan Yen massacre (for those too thick-headed to understand the connection to My Lai, O'Brien includes numerous real-life references). The symbolism here is beyond cloying. As a child John liked to perform magic tricks, and he was subsequently nicknamed "Sorcerer" by his fellow soldiers — he could make things disappear, get it? John has been troubled for some time. He used to spy on Kathy when they were in college, and his father's habit of calling the chubby boy "Jiggling John" apparently wounded him. All of this is awkwardly uncovered through a pretentious structure that cannot disguise the fact that there is no story here. Sinks like a stone.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 061870986X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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