A psychological thriller about an enigmatic killer that’s both inventive and unflinching.
A man struggles to manage the dark trauma of his youth, and the havoc it continues to wreak on his adulthood.
When James Davis was a young teen, he suffered under the abusive tyranny of his father, Frank, an irredeemable alcoholic. James’ father eventually turned his anger toward his wife, Brenda, and he finally killed her in a fit of rage. But then a mysterious man charged into the house and strangled Frank to death. James’ rescuer, Alistair, demanded that his part in the tragic affair be kept a secret, and the teen obliged. Years later, James is lost in shiftless ennui, stuck in a dead-end job, and utterly alone. He finally makes a friend at the gym, Mark, who convinces him to see a therapist, the young and beautiful Natalie Pruitt. For the first time in years, James feels a tinge of hope that he might be able to turn his life around, and find a sliver of animating purpose. But then, Alistair inexplicably shows up, and aggressively inserts himself into James’ life. It’s not clear whether Alistair intends to help James repair his broken existence out of some avuncular impulse, or use him as an instrument for his own twisted ends: “Because of a moment in time of their shared past, Alistair was a part of him, for better or worse, and James knew he would never truly be free.” But James is scared for his life, and for the lives of those close to him, as suddenly there seems to be a killer at large in this previously sleepy Maryland suburb. Debut author Logsdon adeptly captures James’ troubled childhood, intermittently flashing back to scenes from it, while also including narrative vignettes depicting the volatile relationship between his parents. At one point, the young James muses about Frank’s cruelty: “The man knew how to make his verbal assaults cut like a knife,” right in Brenda’s “most vulnerable places.” This is a sepulcher tale, and squeamish readers may struggle with some of the grim details, vividly conveyed, about abuse and murder. But the author slowly, chillingly leads readers to a suspenseful conclusion that makes some forbearance of the book’s gloomier aspects well worth it. This is an unpredictable and heart-pounding mystery.
A psychological thriller about an enigmatic killer that’s both inventive and unflinching.Pub Date: May 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5307-7652-8
Page Count: 292
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2016
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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