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Prophet of Loss

An often striking account of religious opportunism.

In this drama, a charismatic cult leader exploits a downtrodden family.

Celia Waters’ parents take a calculated risk to buy a new house in a small town in South Carolina, using insurance money that they received after Celia’s grandmother’s death to move out of the Blue Wave Mobile Home Community. But then Celia’s father suffers a serious back injury and loses his job delivering newspapers. Her mother is put out of work, too, when the dentist who employs her goes bankrupt. Celia’s dad abuses alcohol and OxyContin, and he grows verbally abusive, hopeless, and uncharacteristically lazy. His spirits improve after he attends a service at the Living Faith Church, and he’s enthralled with one of its ministers—the hypnotic Barrett Higgins, who eventually breaks from the church and starts his own. He then invites Celia’s family to live in his farmhouse rent-free. They become part of a fledgling religious community that becomes increasingly cultish and bizarre. One day, Higgins announces that he’s the second coming of Jesus Christ—to the joy of his new disciples—and takes Celia’s mother to be his new bride. They all start referring to him as “The Prophet.” Celia is singled out to be Higgins’ “own personal Gabriel.” But then she starts to question his divinity—and his motives. Author Weible (Hello from Out Here, 2010, etc.) deftly unpacks the cunning charm of the cult leader in this unsettling novel, showing how Higgins expertly preys on the vulnerabilities of his quarry: “Celia had wanted Barrett, to possess or be possessed by him, so badly because he was the only thing there was to want. That was his greatest trick.” That said, Celia’s father’s descent into helplessness from an initial place of strength seems too precipitous to be plausible. Aside from this narrative flaw, though, it’s a powerful story, and one that effectively illustrates the human capacity for gullibility.

An often striking account of religious opportunism.

Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-692-76126-7

Page Count: 278

Publisher: East West 792

Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2016

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TRUE BETRAYALS

Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.

Pub Date: June 13, 1995

ISBN: 0-399-14059-X

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995

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LAST ORDERS

Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.

Pub Date: April 5, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-41224-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996

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