A tight, action-packed fantasy bursting with vigor.
In this sequel, the survivors of a goblin battle continue their journey to a port city where an even greater evil awaits.
A warrior named Ohlen and his companions, who all have special skills, fought a horde of goblins to rescue some captive villagers. Now the six friends, including Arden, Boudreaux, Gnome, Ruprecht, and she-elf X’andria, are desperate for rest to recoup their strength. On their way to the city of Rockmoor, they visit a mystic healer, Magda, to treat Arden’s battle-scarred face. But Magda instead offers a warning, cryptically citing an impending “dark storm” and “evil terror.” Believing his cohorts need time for improving their abilities, Ohlen separates from them. In Rockmoor, the five remaining friends train intensely: Gnome hones his stealth under a master thief’s schooling while X’andria studies magic. Ohlen unfortunately gets a taste of the accursed evil destined to befall the group when a reanimated corpse attacks him. The evil soon makes its presence known to all, as Arden hurries from an unseen pursuer and someone in the band disappears. The seemingly invisible villain wants something specific from Ohlen and company, pitting them against vile creatures, from rat abominations in the sewer to a much more formidable monster. Hinsley’s (Tinder & Flint, 2016) exhilarating fantasy novel is a tireless array of action and atmosphere. Flashbacks, for example, like Gnome’s startling first encounter with magic, are precise without slowing the narrative. The steady momentum is coupled with constant allusions to forthcoming peril, even Boudreaux’s excessive drinking: “With each cup of the dark golden brew, the pointy edges of worry about their current predicament became duller.” Garretsen’s illustrations harmonize with the prose; images give the impression of having been carved onto a black matte, bestowing the “roiling sea” with the ominous “inky blackness” Hinsley aptly details at one point. Each of the six main characters is spotlighted, though the players are at their best—and most entertaining—when the group is assembled. The story ends with a thorough wrap-up and a Book 3 teaser.
A tight, action-packed fantasy bursting with vigor.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-387-00368-6
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Envision Arts
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2018
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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