For the rest, Dick Lochte serves up an atmospheric triple-cross; Loren D. Estleman spins enough plot twists to make you...
A third helping of the stuff that makes the world go round, along with the stuff that brings it to an end, more often with a bang than a whimper. Newcomers to this goal-oriented series of criminal erotica (Flesh and Blood: Dark Desires, 2002, etc.) will be able to stock their fantasy chests with vengeful stewardesses (Rex Miller), a cop taken hostage by a voracious pair of femmes fatale (Thomas S. Roche), the high-stakes search for a missing pair of panties (Gary Phillips), oversexed spies (Michael Collins and Gayle Lynds), the meteoric rises of multitalented starlets (Gary R. Bush, Robert S. Levinson), and of course vice in old New Orleans (O’Neil De Noux, James L. Traylor) and even older New York (Annette and Martin Meyers, in a gorgeously overblown Prohibition-era piece). Equal opportunity is the order of the day, especially in such notable delicacies as sex with dire consequences is made available to fatalistic Big Apple women (John Lutz’s doomy romance), neighborly suburban types (Jack Kelly’s postlude to Dick and Jane), plus-size dominatrixes (Gary Lovisi’s truly creepy idyll), and enterprising senior citizens for whom nursing homes offer just one more obstacle to surmount (Barbara Collins’s geriatric noir).
For the rest, Dick Lochte serves up an atmospheric triple-cross; Loren D. Estleman spins enough plot twists to make you forget, very briefly, about the low-orgasm count; and eight other tales bring the coupling back up to its normal speed for the series: about Mach 3.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-69039-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
