Past remains both prologue and villain in a solid, satisfying case.
The present is wounded by the past in an expertly judged psychological thriller.
Still reeling from his last case (Projection, 1999), likable forensic psychologist Frank Clevenger wants to shake the demons of his past: booze, drugs, women, and criminal investigations, all compulsions stemming from his scarred childhood. But old friend North Anderson, now chief of police in Nantucket, seeks Clevenger’s insights into a murder: Someone has asphyxiated a five-month-old baby by filling her trachea and nasal passages with window caulking. Clevenger takes on the case, which stirs memories of the physical and psychological abuse he himself suffered at his father’s hands. He finds the infant’s stepbrother Billy particularly compelling—the teenager’s back bears the marks of his father’s repeated lashings. And Billy’s insecure brother Garret also arouses his angst over a guilt-ridden young patient who committed suicide. Billy and Garret’s brutish father, billionaire Darwin Bishop, insists a violent Billy murdered the baby. As the evidence suggests, though, Clevenger senses Bishop is the killer. All the while, he grows irresistibly attracted to Bishop’s second wife Julia, the victim of Bishop’s philandering and physical violence. As he wonders whether love for Julia clouds his work on the case, someone tries to murder the infant’s surviving twin sister. Bishop loses it, literally striking out at Julia in an attack that turns the case around and lands him behind bars, clearly headed toward conviction for his daughter’s murder. Clevenger, Julia, and the boys seek a sunny recovery in Nantucket, but they don’t quite find it. In a surprise-filled coda, Clevenger digs into family history and uncovers a dark secret revealing that someone else, not Bishop, is the killer. Case dismissed? Perhaps from court, but not from the minds of its psychological victims, as a perceptive Ablow makes clear through Clevenger’s sharp observations.
Past remains both prologue and villain in a solid, satisfying case.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-26641-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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