This bracing thriller features an intriguing cast and a realistic plot.
In this sequel, an oil company succeeds despite a dysfunctional chairman, until someone kills him.
The year is 1981. More than a decade has passed since the murderous Captain Courageous stalked Randy Capra halfway around the world. Randy now lives outside Lorain, Ohio, with his wife, Monique, and their three children. He’s the vice president of operations for the DeVille Petroleum Company. When one of its oil wells in Caddo County, Oklahoma, erupts in flames, two DPC workers die instantly while four are critically injured. It takes a week to gain control of the accident site and yet company chairman Dick DeVille isn’t thankful for Randy’s expertise and leadership. He instead complains that Randy took DPC’s plane to the burning well. But Randy knows that the wrong size blowout preventer, suggested by Dick, caused the accident. Company president Bobby Wendover defends Randy’s actions while Dick threatens to fire him. Later, at the DPC Christmas party, organized by Axel Eriksen, liquor flows freely and stripper Marilyn Moore makes the rounds. After the party, when cleaner Graciela Estevez enters the chairman’s office, she finds Dick at his desk with his pants down and his head bashed in. She calls Randy, the only employee she knows who speaks any Spanish. The author revisits his trouble-magnet protagonist of Hunted (2012) at a more secure place in his life, a family man at the dawn of the Reagan era. Wood’s (The Hoo-Li Chronicles, 2019, etc.) knowledge of the oil industry gives the plot weight, as in the line “Dick had told him what specifications his buddies in Houston had suggested, insisting he save money by using a ‘normal’ blowout preventer.” This sequel is also structured more confidently than its predecessor, with richly drawn characters, like the dogged and sympathetic Lt. Jack Grueden, thundering through a traditional whodunit. Still, “sex” remains the operative word at the DPC office because there are enough extramarital liaisons and related fights to win over fans of the soap opera Dallas. While the murder weapon is slightly telegraphed early on, the killer is skillfully hidden until the finale.
This bracing thriller features an intriguing cast and a realistic plot.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-387-33585-5
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
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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