Written with care, though Billingham may need to switch the formula soon.
London police inspector Tom Thorne (Scaredy Cat, 2003) goes up against another sadistic killer—though this time the pulse hardly quickens.
Just as grumpy as he was in his previous outing, Thorne is also a little lonelier and randier: a combination that won’t serve him well in the trap that’s set for him. A murderer with a hard-to-suss motive has started snuffing convicted rapists who’ve been released from prison. He (they think it’s a he) likes to whet the rapists’ appetites with suggestive correspondence and pictures, then lure them to a hotel and—well, the details are a bit rough. Let’s just say there’s little for Thorne and his all-too-human squad at the Metropolitan Police Service (normally a pretty sensitive cop, Thorne fondly remembers a time when they were a “force” and not a “service”) much to go on. Compounding the lack of workable clues is the fact that it’s hard for most people (readers included) to whip up much sympathy for the victims, and when Fleet Street gets a whiff of the story, the tabloids can’t congratulate the killer enough for his deeds. And, just to make Thorne’s personal life (a long, sad round of takeout curry, football on the telly, and cans of lager) even more desolate, his apartment gets burgled and his car stolen. About the only thing looking up for him is the sputtering flirtation he’s carrying on with Eve, a florist who telephoned in the first murder scene Thorne was called to (the killer likes to order bouquets). What the author has going for him is an unusually character-rich policeman who carries some of the gravitas of a George Pelecanos or James Lee Burke protagonist without those authors’ tendencies toward morose self-involvement. Frustratingly, though, the plot is stalled as often as Thorne’s relationship with Eve, and the climax’s big surprise is telegraphed about a hundred pages too early.
Written with care, though Billingham may need to switch the formula soon.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-056085-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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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