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Peacemaking

Name: Peacemaking
Author: Lance LoRusso
ISBN: 978-1-61005-688-5

by Lance LoRusso ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2015

A navel-gazing but forthright and entertaining spiritual novel.

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A veteran cop questions Jesus Christ about the darkness and human suffering he’s seen during his 30 years on the job in LoRusso’s (The World Class Rainmaker, 2012, etc.) novel.

Deputy chief of police Scotty Painter suddenly finds himself in a world of near-perfect serenity, featuring clean air, lush fields, and endless beaches, where he’s finally able to relax the constant vigilance that comes with being a cop. Jesus Christ—here, a wry, loving, reassuring agent of a merciful God—joins him as he struggles with the horrors he’s witnessed in his long career in law enforcement, as well as the fact that he had to take lives in the line of duty. Scotty questions whether he’s done enough with his life; he’s a man who feels his failures more deeply than his successes, fearing that his greatest achievements—such as stopping an abusive husband, training and supporting his fellow officers, and establishing a special counseling program—weren’t enough. LoRusso wrote extensively about officer-involved shootings in his 2013 book When Cops Kill, and in his first work of fiction, he couples that real-world knowledge with a spiritual focus. He presents Scotty as an unimpeachable officer who still wrestles morally with using lethal force. The book’s conversation-with-God approach feels pat. However, the author has a knack for action scenes, keeping them exciting but never exploitative; even in flashbacks, the danger feels very real. Scotty experiences bouts of sudden sleep and pain throughout the narrative, which provides a clue to why he has an audience with Jesus and offers a nice metaphor for life itself. There are some underused story elements, such as the death of Scotty’s father when he was a child, the recent loss of his wife, and his relationship with their daughter, Celina, which take a back seat to tales of his work as a cop.

A navel-gazing but forthright and entertaining spiritual novel.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-61005-688-5

Page Count: 140

Publisher: BookLogix

Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE SHINING

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 28, 1976

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A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).

The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....

Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.

Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976

ISBN: 0385121679

Page Count: 453

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
NEVER FLINCH
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
YOU LIKE IT DARKER
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
HOLLY
by Stephen King

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.