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
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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