A light, enjoyable murder mystery that marks the beginning of a promising new series.
A rookie reporter delves into a small town’s big secrets in Kirsch’s debut mystery novel.
Stella Reynolds is desperate. She needs a job, and her only option is a tiny TV station in Bozeman, Montana, far away from the glamorous life of a big-city reporter. The hours are long, the equipment is ancient, and newsworthy stories are few and far between. As she begins to learn the ropes of her new job, she chases a story that has the potential to launch her to bigger and better things. While her colleagues cover animal adoptions at the Humane Society and the buffalo situation in Yellowstone National Park, she manages to stumble across an unexpectedly juicy story involving a double murder. It’s big news, but the sheriff’s case against the prime murder suspect is weak, and there’s something fishy going on with the investigation. It soon becomes apparent that the deaths are only the tip of the iceberg; there’s an even bigger story out there involving a conspiracy that could bring down local, state, and federal authorities. Stella follows the trail, assisted by her co-workers and a potential love interest from a competing network. Kirsch’s novel is full of humor, mystery, and romantic tension. The story is well-paced, deftly balancing action with moments of suspense and discovery. Stella is a wonderfully relatable protagonist who spills coffee with startling regularity yet manages to maintain an air of composure when covering stories. Kirsch’s own journalistic background lends an authenticity to the tale, and Stella’s on-screen flubs, embarrassing moments, and small-town reporting feel legitimate. Solid supporting characters offer additional interest, especially Stella’s acerbic co-worker Vindi. Although readers will appreciate the presence of John, the handsome love interest, the rapport between Vindi and Stella brings a little girl power to the classic Holmes/Watson–style relationship.
A light, enjoyable murder mystery that marks the beginning of a promising new series.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9969350-0-5
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Sunnyside Press
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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