An easy, fast-paced tale of criminal intrigue that’s part Wild West, part Fargo.
Kildare, the author of The Tragedy of Beauty (2018), offers a neo-Western set on the prairies of North Dakota during a 21st-century oil boom.
In the early 2000s, precise directional drilling became a viable technology for recovering oil, so regions located over the Bakken Formation (a massive rock under the ground in Montana, North Dakota, and parts of Canada) saw rapid upticks in industry, revenue, and population. The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, nestled in the northeastern corner of North Dakota, was no exception. But with the rapid boom came social consequences, and Gena Blood Crow, a young tribal cop, is determined to guard her community from the encroaching presence of drugs, crime, and corruption. Although her mission is personal—her own brother was murdered by members of a drug cartel—she’s often frustrated by her perpetually understaffed department and a seemingly inescapable maze of competing jurisdictions. Her uncle, the stubborn Boots Charging Thunder, decides to take revenge into his own hands and organize a local militia to eliminate the cartel by whatever means necessary. Law enforcement, the militia, and the cartel are soon heading toward one another on an inevitable crash course. What could have been a simplistic tale of good guys versus bad is complicated by the machinations of local bureaucracy and politics—and by villains who fall in love with heroes’ innocent relatives, which is true to the nature of life in a small town. One cartel leader stands out as a memorably complex figure: Rafael Vega is a seasoned drug runner and a coldblooded killer, but he also senses others’ sadness and feels guilty about the blood on his hands; he’s even conversant in chaos theory. An unexpected love affair also gives him a profound desire to change his life. Kildare’s tightly controlled sentences and smooth dialogue are engaging and chock-full of splendid detail aside from the occasional cliché (“The puppet had become the puppet master”).
An easy, fast-paced tale of criminal intrigue that’s part Wild West, part Fargo.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9963057-4-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Kildare Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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