A man’s search for his missing uncle leads him into the Arizona desert, where secrets—and maybe some bodies—are buried in Ingwalson’s (WDYG, 2013, etc.) latest thriller.
When 22-year-old Sin gets a call from a former agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a woman known as la Calavera, he immediately goes to see her. She’s been sent a picture of Sin’s uncle, el Viejo, at Denzhone, an upscale vacation spa where the elderly man goes to relax. El Viejo, once a Marine sniper, had raised (and trained) the boy since he was a bullied tween carrying his dad’s gun in his backpack. The picture’s considered a possible threat, taken from what could be a sniper’s vantage point, and sure enough, el Viejo is nowhere to be found. Sin, unsure if his uncle is alive or dead, scours Arizona to find out what has happened to el Viejo and why. Ingwalson’s neo-Western thriller showcases a first-rate protagonist, who stays calm under pressure even when outnumbered. The oscillating timeline lays out some of Sin’s back story, from his tormented school days to his life as a young man under the wing of el Viejo, who became his mentor. Much of Sin’s training with his uncle remains a mystery, but it’s enough to pique interest. Sin’s family is also fascinating, especially his older sister, Nicki, who left the home when Sin was 11 years old and whom he misses dearly; apparently in hiding, she offers another puzzle to be solved, based on a cryptic phone call that Sin makes. Though Sin revels in the violence—his equating the feel of a gun to “a little orgasm in his hand” is particularly jolting—he’s equally at home handling surveillance. In fact, the novel’s best scenes occur when Sin follows a trail in the desert sand, spying on a couple of shady characters, and checking a restaurant and motels to get info on mercenaries who might be behind el Viejo’s disappearance. Sin does find resolution, at least in this story, but Ingwalson has created a world ripe for exploration in future novels. A sterling achievement, featuring an ultracool protagonist and doting descriptions of all types of guns.
Pub Date: May 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497343405
Page Count: 192
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
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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