A purely entertaining adventure novel of a fearless woman in a most dangerous line of work.
McMillin (The Butcher’s Daughter, 2015, etc.) continues the story of the fictional pirate-queen Bloody Mary in this swashbuckling sequel.
In the previous installment, things had just begun to look up for Lady Mary, the smuggler leader and the illegitimate heir to an Irish royal line. Shortly after helping defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588—and thus repaying a debt she owed to Queen Elizabeth I—Mary and her crew killed the leaders of a rival smuggler clan, the Síol Faolcháin. Unfortunately, this victory begets tragedy when Kayne Dowlin, the leader of the Síol Faolcháin survivors, ambushes the now-pregnant Mary in a remote mill, murdering her lover, James Hunter. Later, after leaving her newborn daughter in the hands of friends, Mary sets out to reassemble her crew and reacquire her ships before checking in with her patron, the queen. Elizabeth suggests that Mary join the massive retaliatory expedition that Sir Francis Drake and Sir Black John Norreys are planning against Spain. For both Mary and Elizabeth, the order of the day is lex talionis, the law of retaliation—an eye for an eye, or, as Mary prefers it, “blood for blood.” But as Mary well knows, revenge is a dangerous pursuit, and it will take her from the Iberian peninsula to the New World and back to Ireland. McMillin’s prose, as narrated by Mary, is as full of romance and swagger as one would expect in a tale of a pirate captain: “A biting wind ripping across the harbor cut into my bones as I walked my horse down the narrow streets of the old Barbican Quarter where Drake was using the home of a wealthy merchant as his headquarters.” The author’s aim seems to be to transport Mary to as many colorful locales as possible, and he certainly does so over the course of this book. Although the characters that surround her are all pretty stock, the novel upholds the fine tradition of old high-seas adventure stories with a pace that doesn’t let up until the final cutlass clatters to the deck.
A purely entertaining adventure novel of a fearless woman in a most dangerous line of work.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9838179-4-9
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Hephaestus Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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