Sea, sky, tossing waves, curling whitecaps, foam, rowboats cutting through a wild unrest (as Whitman puts it)—not to mention...
Strong debut melodrama, solid as granite, not a cliché in sight.
Screenwriter Mills’s research into Long Island’s South Fork fishing village of Amagansett as it was in 1947 stands forth with superb detail. The story draws its subject matter from village lore, from wondrous fishing scenes (especially for giant tuna), and from the invasion of the town by wealthy snobs—who allow no Jews on the fancy golf course. Conrad Labarde, son of Basque fishermen, and his retarded mate Rollo are hauling a seine into shore when it becomes clear that there’s a woman’s body in with the fish and big shark in their net. She’s Lillian Wallace, a millionaire’s daughter and, as we later learn, Conrad’s secret lover—secret since her family would never approve of an affair with a fisherman. Conrad thinks she was murdered and begins a private investigation. Meanwhile, Deputy Sheriff Tom Hollis, with slightly more evidence, comes to the same thought and also begins his own secret investigation. The reader weighs various suspects until, halfway through, Mills lets us know who the bad guys are, although with no loss of suspense. So this is less murder mystery than, well, epic drama peopled with leathery fishermen, gabby townsfolk, and big-spending mansion dwellers. As background, perhaps a fifth of the pages fill in Conrad’s incredible war record of fighting Nazis all over Europe, experience that develops his charisma and underpins the climax. Typical native lingo: “I got a mess o’ clams and a bluefish needs eating. I’d boil up a lobster, only I’m sick to the hind teeth of the damned things.”
Sea, sky, tossing waves, curling whitecaps, foam, rowboats cutting through a wild unrest (as Whitman puts it)—not to mention high humor and heartfelt sex.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-399-15184-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Connelly takes a break from his Harry Bosch police novels (The Last Coyote, p. 328, etc.) for something even more intense: a reporter's single-minded pursuit of the serial killer who murdered his twin. Even his buddies in the Denver PD thought Sean McEvoy's shooting in the backseat of his car looked like a classic cop suicide, right clown to the motive: his despondency over his failure to clear the murder of a University of Denver student. But as Sean's twin brother, Jack, of the Rocky Mountain News, notices tiny clues that marked Sean's death as murder, his suspicions about the dying message Sean scrawled inside his fogged windshield—"Out of space. Out of time"—alert him to a series of eerily similar killings stretching from Sarasota to Albuquerque. The pattern, Jack realizes, involves two sets of murders: a series of sex killings of children, and then the executions (duly camouflaged as suicides) of the investigating police officers. Armed with what he's dug up, Jack heads off to Washington, to the Law Enforcement Foundation and the FBI. The real fireworks begin as Jack trades his official silence for an inside role in the investigation, only to find himself shut out of both the case and the story. From then on in, Jack, falling hard for Rachel Walling, the FBI agent in charge of the case, rides his Bureau connections like a bucking bronco—even as one William Gladden, a pedophile picked up on a low-level charge in Santa Monica, schemes to make bail before the police can run his prints through the national computer, then waits with sick patience for his chance at his next victim. The long-awaited confrontation between Jack and Gladden comes at an LA video store; but even afterward, Jack's left with devastating questions about the case. Connelly wrings suspense out of every possible aspect of Jack's obsessive hunt for his brother's killer. Prepare to be played like a violin.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-15398-2
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
Homer’s deserved primacy makes us often forget that Virgil is in many ways his equal. Fagles’s triumphant new achievement...
The founding of Rome and the maturation of a hero who has greatness thrust upon him are the subjects of Virgil’s first-century (b.c.) epic, newly available in Princeton scholar Fagles’s energetic verse translation.
It succeeds Fagles’s critically acclaimed and very popular English-language renderings of Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey, the touchstones that preceded and inspired Virgil (the Latin poet’s hero Aeneas in fact makes a brief appearance in the Iliad). In 12 Books containing nearly 10,000 lines of unrhymed verse hexameters (i.e., six stresses per line), Virgil tells of the endangered voyages of Aeneas’s fleet of ships following the devastation of the Trojan War; his dalliance with Queen Dido of Carthage, and the abandonment of her that adds the scorned monarch’s lethal rage to that of (Aeneas’s nemesis) the offended goddess Juno; the hero’s journey to the underworld and reunion with the ghost of his father Anchises (one of classical literature’s imperishable scenes); and a litany of the deeds and sufferings of noble Romans that expands into a prophetic vision of a glorious future. Veteran scholar Bernard Knox’s replete introduction brilliantly summarizes the poem’s provenance, meanings and influence. And a “Translator’s Postscript” both emphasizes and illustrates “[Virgil’s] unequaled blend of grandeur and accessibility . . . of eloquence and action, heroics and humanity.” Fagles varies the hexameter pattern ingeniously, condensing to five stresses, or expanding to seven, depending on the desired rhetorical or emotional effect (e.g., “the dank night is sweeping down from the sky / and the setting stars incline our heads to sleep”)—and demonstrates his talents smashingly in scenes set in “The Kingdom of the Dead” (where, amid sulphurous sound and fury, we hear “. . . a crescendo of wailing, / ghosts of infants weeping, robbed of their share / of this sweet life, at its very threshold too”).
Homer’s deserved primacy makes us often forget that Virgil is in many ways his equal. Fagles’s triumphant new achievement makes us remember it.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03803-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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