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STEADY TROUBLE

Name: STEADY TROUBLE
Author: Mike McCrary
ISBN: 978-1-5217-4311-9

From the Steady Teddy series , Vol. 1

by Mike McCrary ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 3, 2017

Unmitigated energy, aided by a protagonist as captivating as she is formidable.

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A woman’s recent addition to a trust fund could earn her a windfall—provided the other beneficiaries don’t kill her first—in this thriller.

Texas bartender Theodora, better known as Steady Teddy, has had trouble with her memory since she sustained brain trauma when she was 18. Her injury stems from a home invasion resulting in her parents’ murders, an incident that an unknown man, sitting at her bar one night, inexplicably knows all about. The stranger, Gordon, makes Teddy an offer—a “life changer”—that involves a visit to New York City. As she’s evidently incited dangerous individuals with her money-making, after-hours poker games, Teddy agrees. She meets wealthy but dying New Yorker Jonathan McCluskey, who wants to make Teddy the sixth beneficiary to his trust fund. McCluskey only knows her from the bar but deems her more deserving of his money than his despised family. Perusing the trust documents, however, Teddy reads that her fellow beneficiaries (McCluskey’s wife and sons) will want her dead—and will likely try to make that happen. The typically wary woman, who’s prone to violent outbursts and blackouts, will have to rely on relative strangers for help, along with her wits and her trusty baseball bat by her side. McCrary’s (Remo Went Down, 2017, etc.) raucous novel is a Hollywood action film in print form, sizzling with fights of the gun and fist varieties. There’s little room for plot development, but further details of both Teddy’s parents and the McCluskey clan are revealed later. Though she often resorts to rage, Teddy is surprisingly winsome. In her lively first-person narrative, for example, she calls McCluskey the “pre-death dude,” and when a couple of uninvited armed men sit at her diner booth, she drolly poses the question of asking for separate checks. The speedy tale takes readers on a car chase or two before an inevitable showdown in California, with the ending stamped with a final twist and set-up for a sequel.

Unmitigated energy, aided by a protagonist as captivating as she is formidable.

Pub Date: July 3, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5217-4311-9

Page Count: 302

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
RELENTLESS
by Mike McCrary

- BOOK REVIEW
Genuinely Dangerous
by Mike McCrary

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- SEEN & HEARD
Salinger Focus of NYPL Exhibit

- SEEN & HEARD
NYC Mayoral Candidates Name Favorite Gotham Books

- APPRECIATIONS
Holden Caulfield: Forever Young

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JURASSIC PARK

by Michael Crichton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 1990

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Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.