Sanders's name, like that of the aging Bela Lugosi, has lately become a virtual guarantee of incompetence. Here, his dogged tour of the Decalogue continues with a tale of murder, theft, and assorted lesser crimes that would be sub par for anyone else but that's no lower than his recent average. Brainy, dumpy insurance-investigator Dora Conti is pulled away from her loving Hartford hubby Mario to see whether one of the beneficiaries of jewelry colossus Lewis Starrett's $3 million policy may have stabbed him to death. The big questions here are: (1) Which of the Starrett survivors and hangers-on looks the most suspicious-widow Olivia, dazzled by "Father" Brian Gallaway; daughter Felicia, hooked on drugs and con-man Turner Pierce; son Clayton, big-time adulterer (with Turner's sister Helene) and importer of gold; or Clayton's charity-ball wife Eleanor, a stranger to sex for the years since her miscarriage? (2) Will Dora solve the mystery, by engaging a scruffy computer-hacker and poring over the evidence until she notices details that have been screaming at the most comatose readers, before the entire cast is killed off? (3) How many murderers can fit between the covers of one book (four fatal stabbings are committed by four different people)? (4) Will Dora submit to the blandishments of N.Y.C. policeman John Wenden (who doesn't just want a quickie—it's something more than that) or be true to Mario? (5) When will Sanders stop wrapping his well-observed portraits of predatory greed in the mystery-detective trappings he still hasn't mastered? You might want to know that nobody does time for any of those four murders, and Dora, headed back to Mario, recommends the big-ticket claim be paid in full. Ironic.
Pub Date: April 15, 1991
ISBN: 9994602748
Page Count: -
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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