Proficiently develops characters, relationships, and storylines in the midst of nonstop action.
The fifth entry in Arceneaux’s (North Beach, 2015, etc.) thriller series finds the Sweetwater family searching for one of their own—19-year-old Augie, who inexplicably vanished in Mexico.
Though it’s been only a couple of days since Raul Sweetwater’s heard from his son, Augustus, he’s still worried. Augie had been touring the Mexican Gulf Coast to touch base with clients of Sweetwater Marine, the family’s Texas business. Raul voices his concerns to his uncle Charlie, and despite Charlie’s assurance that Augie is fine, the family’s phone calls to customers and the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City have turned up nothing. So Charlie and Raul head south. Charlie flies to the southern end of the Gulf in Veracruz, while his nephew works his way down the coast until the two reconnect in Tuxpan. Both men—hearing stories of Mexican drug cartels as well as a vicious one-eyed pirate named Mal de Ojo (Evil Eye)—surmise that someone has kidnapped Augie. In the meantime, the dazed teen awakens on a boat, held captive and secured by a chained metal collar. Now effectively a slave, Augie can wait for rescue or try to escape, either option providing the distinct possibility that he won’t survive. Arceneaux sets a breathless pace from the beginning by separating Charlie and Raul, who gather info and clues twice as quickly. In the same vein, perspective from Augie bolsters suspense. He’s introduced on the ship, initially baffled as to how he ended up there. His scenes are often bleak, courtesy of his brutal captors, but the story eases tension with comic relief. Augie, for example, imagines a letter to his family: “Dear Mom, Dad, and Sis—It’s been a good month for pillage and plunder.” The tale references events from preceding books, though narrative context ensures readers who are just joining the series won’t be lost.
Proficiently develops characters, relationships, and storylines in the midst of nonstop action.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9968797-4-3
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Brent Douglass
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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