A violent, thrilling mystery hampered at times by overly gruesome exposition.
A debut novel following a former hit man who tries to eliminate old enemies before the past catches up with him.
Tristan Stonehorse just got out of prison; someone is already trying to kill him. While repaying a debt he owed a prison gang leader, Tristan finds himself in the middle of an ambush, realizing that someone from the past, someone dangerous and with deep connections, wants him gone for good. Unfortunately for Tristan, the list of suspects is long. After his time as one of the First Nation Syndicate’s top hit men in Canada, there are crooked Mounties, vengeful Hells Angels, and plenty of other shadowy underworld figures who wouldn’t mind him dead. His only clue comes from the execution of a former associate, whose last words point Tristan to a particular job he’d like to forget. As he moves across Canada to stay one step ahead of his pursuers, he revisits his time serving the British forces in Operation Desert Storm as well as the painful memories of his childhood abuse at the hands of twisted priests—a last vendetta he wants to repay and a source of surprising emotional vulnerability. As all these past sins start coming together and closing down on the resourceful Tristan, his daughter, who had finally moved out of the shadows of her father’s crimes, becomes both his biggest weakness and a potential path to real justice. Fleishman mainly writes in the present tense, creating a frantic and absorbing pace that builds intriguing distance from this dangerous main character as he reacts with brutal, calculated force. Tristan has all the makings of a tremendous and complex antihero, reminiscent of those found in Cormac McCarthy or James Ellroy novels. However, the past-tense chapters feel sluggish in comparison. These sections, which detail his past crimes, seem to limp from one grisly act of violence to the next. They provide answers about Tristan, but instead of adding depth, they make him less sympathetic and less interesting.
A violent, thrilling mystery hampered at times by overly gruesome exposition.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9876927-1-9
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Wheat Kings Endeavor
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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