A measured pace as methodical and practical as the murder story’s diplomatic protagonist.
Philadelphia Sheriff Chris DeAngelo returns to solve the killing of a political candidate’s wife, complete with a plethora of suspects and motives, in this thriller.
Checking on a car accident, DeAngelo’s taken aback when realizing the body behind the wheel is Sherry Mills, wife of Republican senator/gubernatorial hopeful Steven Mills. But it gets worse: her death was by gunshot. Mayor Elaine Strick wants to expedite the investigation and get it out of the papers, because her town of Macon is suffering from the notoriety surrounding a recent serial-killer case, which the sheriff wrapped up. She nominates the husband as the initial suspect, but then Strick’s also supporting Mills’ primary opponent, Rupert Kerman. As it turns out, there are quite a few people who had reason to prefer Sherry dead. Whoever had been supplying her with pills, for one, may have wanted her silenced, as would certain individuals with knowledge of her affair with a restaurant owner. DeAngelo and his always-reliable deputy, Rosemary Tippets, sift through the evidence to narrow the suspect list, but the most likely person winds up a murder victim, leading to further questions. The sheriff soon comes across more bodies and finds himself in someone’s cross hairs, in a town where everyone seems to use the same .308-caliber rifle that killed Sherry. Mucci’s (A Season to Kill, 2015) tale is dense with plot, which includes an assortment of felonious deeds, from blackmail and burglary to a mobster’s presence. Pinning down a murderer—if it’s just one—is a challenge, but with DeAngelo at the helm, it’s likewise absorbing. The sheriff, for example, rarely sways; sure, he takes time to flirt with “super-hot bartender” Maryanne, but only because she works at the restaurant owned by one of his suspects. DeAngelo layers his first-person narrative with cynicism, equating a snow-covered property with “an arctic outpost in desperate need of resupply.” But he combines this hard-boiled detective quality with a pragmatic outlook, which truly makes him stand out: he’s a struggling alcoholic who still drinks, just less than usual. The sheriff’s a work in progress, knowing his success requires time and effort, an approach he applies to his investigations.
A measured pace as methodical and practical as the murder story’s diplomatic protagonist.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9976718-3-4
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Rook Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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