Pace crafts compelling characters in service to a thrilling plot, with narrative riches in a vein thought by many to be...
Pace’s debut supernatural thriller follows Sheriff Estin Booker as he faces off against the ultimate cosmic force.
In Cumberton, Md., trouble begins soon after a construction crew unearths a small wooden box at the site of a new dormitory at the local Christian college. Trapped within the box is Lucifer’s Light, a tool that can bring about a worldwide descent into Hell. Once released, it begins rapidly claiming souls, driving young and old to commit horrific suicides under the amplified guilt of any past transgressions. Assisted by a lovely but hard-bitten Baltimore detective on forced vacation, Booker investigates to the best of his ability. But with the Light on the loose and demonic enforcers on call, even being armed and faithful may not be enough. While satanic thrillers may have gone out of vogue in the ’70s, Pace makes a good argument for reviving the genre, bringing hard-edged rationality and modern investigative techniques to bear on his supernatural plot. Despite frequent flashbacks that span nearly four centuries, the plot flows with clarity and economy, maintaining a narrative rhythm that provides all the information readers need without rushing the story. Some of the character flourishes aren’t as successful—the enforced using of “shuck” instead of the F-word quickly grates on the reader’s internal ear, defeating its purpose—but overall, the players are more well-rounded than strictly called for by the genre. Characters that might seem to be antagonistic, such as the TV evangelist who founded the college, turn out to have surprising depth and sympathies—making their eventual fates more rewarding or, in some cases, heartbreaking.
Pace crafts compelling characters in service to a thrilling plot, with narrative riches in a vein thought by many to be played out.Pub Date: March 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615518428
Page Count: 450
Publisher: River Point Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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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