Lynn Nelson takes her teenage daughter on a wilderness vacation and winds up saving America from nuclear destruction. Veteran romancer Robards (Hunter's Moon, 1995, etc.) puts another thirtysomething couple through the adventure-and-sexual-tension wringer before they get to have hot, mutually fulfilling sex on a ledge in a pitch-black deserted mine- -he with a bullet wound in his shoulder and she dressed in a battered Wonderbra and with no cigarettes (cold turkeying off nicotine, it seems, has become the newest ritual in tough-guy romance plots). To get closer to her rebellious daughter, Lynn, a single mother and Chicago anchorwoman, helps chaperon 19 teenage girls on a trip into Utah's Uinta National Forest, led by Owen Feldman and his brother Jess, ``a tall, handsome, tawny-maned stranger in skintight jeans, boots, and a cowboy hat, whom she'd caught eyeing her legs before they even said hello.'' After suffering saddle sores, insect bites, and mother-daughter trauma, Lynn falls off a crumbling ledge, along with her daughter, Rory Elizabeth, and is saved by that utterly cool, competent, insolent cowboy. The three begin the trudge back to civilization, a difficult but not impossible hike. But then they discover a compound of cabins with a crucified man displayed out front and a field full of bodies nearby. Jess, it turns out, is a ex-ATF agent who was at Waco, and he has nightmares because he couldn't save all the innocent women and children. He, Lynn, and Rory use all their survival skills to escape the white-robed bad guys, members of a religious cult called the Healers, and then to detonate 12 computer-controlled bombs before the cult can initiate Armageddon. Robards, whose white knights wear jeans instead of armor, knows the sexy grownup romance that's expected of her and always acquits herself well. It's a time-tested product, and she's a skilled producer. (Main selection of the Literary Guild)
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-31038-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
I loved it — and to my mind — it fits admirably an immediate need in our season's lists, — the need for a richly patterned story spun out of another layer of that peculiar underworld with which Steinbeck is at his best. Once again, as in Tortilla Flat, he makes no effort to stress "social significance". To be sure, one can strain at his underlying meanings and say that such people should not exist in today's plenty — but no one can argue that they wouldn't exist again tomorrow if eliminated today. Flotsam and jetsam of humanity, — the gang of boys who could get jobs but didn't except when emergency demanded — and then quit when the emergency passed. Lee's felicitous acquiescence to their thinly veiled urging that they become caretakers of his newly acquired shack; their neighbors in the deserted lot; Doc, high mogul of the marine laboratory, doctor to the neighborhood on occasion, beloved by all; and the others who made up the dregs of Cannery Row. The story builds up to first one and then another climax, as the boys plan a party for Doc. There's humor — and pathos — and sheer good story telling as the incidents unfold. The plot is tenuous, held together by the characters. But Steinbeck succeeds in making them human, likable, out of drawing but never in caricature. And one feels that to him, too, they are part of the flavor of a folk legend of today.
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 1944
ISBN: 0140187375
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1944
Novelist/historian Carr (The Devil's Soldier, 1991, etc.) combines his two preferred modes with a meaty, if overslung, serial- killer quest set in 1896 New York. A series of gruesome murders and mutilations of heartrendingly young prostitutes—boys dressed as girls—reunites three alumni of William James' pioneering Harvard psychology lectures: Times reporter John Schuyler Moore, eminent psychologist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler (called, after the fashion of the time, an ``alienist''), and New York Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. Despite Moore's skepticism about Roosevelt's plan to put Kreizler on the case (``You'd be better off hiring an African witch doctor,'' he says about his old friend), Kreizler steadily compiles a profile of the killer based on a combination of forensic and psychological evidence. The man they're looking for is over six feet tall; about 30 years old; an expert mountaineer; either a priest or a man from a strongly religious background; a veteran of some time among Indians. As Moore tours Manhattan's nastiest nightspots and Kreizler's net closes around a suspect, Carr fills out his narrative with obligatory cameos by Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis, J.P. Morgan, Anthony Comstock, and Franz Boas, and didactic digressions on the rise of Bertillon measurements, fingerprints, the Census Bureau, and gourmet dining (courtesy of Delmonico's) in America. The result is somehow gripping yet lifeless, as evocative period detail jostles with a cast of characters who are, for the most part, as pallid as the murder victims. Still, it must be said that the motivation of the demented killer is worked out with chilling, pitying conviction. Unremarkable as a genre thriller, then, but highly satisfactory as fictionalized social history. (Film rights to Paramount; Literary Guild Alternate Selection)
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41779-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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