It’s not the paucity of action but the flawed characterizations that hurt this oppressive work the most.
Serial killer bonds with cop in a first novel with a high body count.
The first corpse shows up in the prologue. Val Millimaki, only 12 and a devout altar boy, finds his mother in a barn on their Montana farm; she has hanged herself. Without missing a beat, the novel confronts us with an old man, in open country, shooting to death a man he’s robbed, cutting off his head and hands and directing his accomplice to bury him. The old man, John Gload, has been burying anonymous victims for years. Then we're back to Millimaki, now grown and a sheriff’s deputy, tracking a lost skier in the mountains with his dog; they find her dead. Subsequently they’ll track down three more missing people, all found dead. The grim stats have taken a toll on the introspective deputy and strained his marriage to Glenda, an ICU nurse better able to handle death. Meanwhile, Gload has been arrested (the accomplice snitched), and Millimaki has been given the graveyard shift to guard him and pry loose details of old crimes. The two discover they were both farm kids, plowing the fields. Gload reveals he first killed during a home invasion at 14 and understood this would be his line of work, a remarkable insight for such a young dude. Their late-night talks, Gload hulking behind bars like a zoo animal, dominate the novel. Millimaki can’t sleep; Glenda has left him; and his tracking results deepen his misery. His failure to press Gload on the mysterious disappearance of his live-in girlfriend, Francie, typifies his dullness of spirit. Gload will manage one last kill, monster that he is, but sadly, he’s not an interesting monster.
It’s not the paucity of action but the flawed characterizations that hurt this oppressive work the most.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9951-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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