Too cluttered, but with sympathetic heroes and its free-for-all shenanigans, it will likely amuse genre fans.
Napierski (Moonin Canoe & White Owl: The Great Gold Heist of 1870, 2016), picking up where the first novel in his series left off, sends his two Lakota heroes, brothers Moonin Canoe and White Owl, off on another Old West adventure full of bad guys, high jinks, and low deeds.
The authorities have yet to recover all the missing gold from the 1870 train robbery in the last installment, but now they have bigger fish to fry. The ruthless and clever Silas Marless is planning to enrich the coffers of his California criminal enterprise, the Rice Factory, by acquiring claims to a few major gold mines on the southern side of the Black Hills. Marless’ late partner, Col. Fletcher Montgomery, split his gold claims between Marless and the Montgomery Ranch caretaker, Teddy Metz. U.S. Marshal Ed “Granny” Mondey, working together with Pinkerton inspector Tyrone “Butch” Zon, is out to stop Marless before the outlaw can appropriate Teddy’s share, start a new gold rush, and, ultimately, push the Lakotas off their land. He recruits Moonin and Owl to pick up Teddy at the Denver train station; unfortunately, it turns out that Teddy is no longer on the train. He may be 80 years old and going senile, but he’s a wily survivor, and it takes almost half the book for Moonin and Owl to track him down. Along the way, the novel is populated by a voluminous secondary cast of miscreants, including corrupt politicians, deadly gun slingers, and a slew of repulsive “enforcers” and their coteries. Happily, Napierski provides a list of characters up front, but it won’t do much to help readers trying to keep track of the numerous subplots and assorted ulterior motives. Still, this is a rollicking, shoot-’em-up farce, filled with brutish players who ultimately get their just deserts. Despite his overuse of adolescent bathroom humor, Napierski does skillfully provide succinct, vivid character descriptions: “With his big bushy beard dripping cigar drool, hairy paws, and country charm, Beales resembled a bear in buttons.”
Too cluttered, but with sympathetic heroes and its free-for-all shenanigans, it will likely amuse genre fans.Pub Date: July 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5429-5053-4
Page Count: 380
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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