Crane’s (Baghdad on the Wabash, 2013, etc.) novel uses true-crime fact to fuel tense, emotional fiction.
Marcella Armand and her husband, Gavin, are living a solid, healthy life in suburban Illinois when their youngest child, Hannah, goes missing on her way to school one day. The family, neighborhood, and law enforcement spring into action and seem to leave no stone unturned, but as days turn to weeks and then months, there’s no sign of the child. Refusing to give up hope, Marcella and Gavin hire a private investigator to look into the case, but his few leads are thin and dwindling fast. Some readers may have trouble connecting with the characters in these early sections, dominated as they are by exposition and action, but those who press on will be richly rewarded with portraits of complex, human figures as the novel develops. The world continues spinning, and the couple has to figure out how to live in it, eventually moving from Illinois to New Jersey in search of a new start, against Marcella’s instincts. The couple’s bond feels genuine, and the novel paints an impressive picture of how their struggle with Hannah’s disappearance alternately rekindles their romance and drives a wedge between them. Tensions rise and fall, and infidelity hangs over them like a pall—Marcella had an affair before Hannah’s birth, and she now has suspicions involving Gavin and his secretary. What’s more, Marcella becomes obsessed with a murder that took place in their new neighborhood in 1957: the real-life case of Edgar Smith, who was convicted of killing a 15-year-old. She delves deeper and deeper into the Smith case and into the story of the man himself, looking for the truth and justice that she fears she’ll never get for herself. As her investigation of Smith intensifies and new leads take shape in Hannah’s case, the story takes on a whole new level of intensity, raising questions of whether Hannah will be found, what sort of justice can be had, and what can possibly be left for this family at the end of it all. A dynamic novel about justice, betrayal, and the attachment that we feel to our darkest stories.
Pub Date: Dec. 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9969704-1-9
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Breadalbane Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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