More than a straight-up police procedural, this tale gives readers the excitement of the chase while taking them deep into...
The adventures of Detective Jack Bailey continue as he and his partner run down clues in pursuit of a serial killer on the loose in Chicago in this sequel.
As in the first installment of the Bailey series, the past is always looming in this tale. The police detective’s PTSD both colors his interpretation of events and is affected by them. The trail begins when Sister Anne Celeste, a beloved elderly nun, is found strangled in her room with no sign of forced entry or struggle. Bailey and his young, college-educated partner, Karl “Sherk” Sherkenbach, complement each other, focusing on different clues and approaching witnesses in their own ways. But all the while, they are tossing jokes over each other’s heads, with Sherk favoring literary references and Bailey, old cultural allusions (“We’re about at Abbott’s place. Wonder if Costello’s there”). Since the nun served during the tenure of a priest accused of child molestation, they wonder if there is a connection. Their suspicions are confirmed when the second and third victims are suspected pedophiles. But the plot does not run in a straight line. There are many twists, some quite significant, as well as numerous subplots dealing with Bailey’s and Sherk’s personal lives, their ambivalence about hunting someone ridding the world of pedophiles, their attitudes toward the job, and even their finances. In many ways, Bailey is your typical fictional police detective. He lives alone; remains cynical and irritable; thrives on junk food; drinks too much; and answers to the requisite pain-in-the-neck boss. But Lelvis (Bailey’s Law, 2016) skillfully fleshes out what could have been a mere stereotype into a vibrant, living, breathing human being. She does this subtly with all her characters, assembling them brick by brick while simultaneously building plot tension through hints and innuendoes that are slowly revealed naturally as the story unfolds. Even the killer is no one-dimensional bogeyman but an empathetic individual developed through chapters devoted to him.
More than a straight-up police procedural, this tale gives readers the excitement of the chase while taking them deep into the psyches of its diverse characters.Pub Date: April 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68433-009-6
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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