Though bumpy at times, this welcome addition to the crime-fiction genre features a refreshingly new type of heroine.
In this law enforcement procedural much in the vein of William J. Caunitz and Bill Pronzini, two FBI agents are assigned to protect a congressman who’s getting threatening letters.
Healy’s taut debut novel launches immediately into the action: FBI agents Alex Toles (a female) and Brian Fallon are assigned to investigate anonymous threatening letters being sent to New York “golden boy” Congressman Christopher O’Brien. When they get to New Rochelle, Fallon will pose as a Secret Service addition to the congressman’s staff, while Toles will act as a PR assistant to O’Brien’s strong-willed ex-wife, Cassidy, an English teacher, and thereby be in a good position to watch over both Cassidy and her and O’Brien’s 6-year-old son, Dylan. A sexual and romantic attraction sparks between idealistic Cassidy and love ’em–and–leave ’em Toles—fairly standard for the genre, except for the lesbian bent. The novel’s matter-of-fact approach to that point will exasperate some readers even as others might appreciate how candid it is. Both Toles and O’Brien have ties to the president; the congressman is “point person on several key pieces of legislation,” and the agent served under the president years ago when they were both stationed in Iraq. The central drama of the plot is well-handled, as it gradually becomes apparent that there are higher stakes at play than a relatively simple case of an obsessed stalker. But the writing can sometimes fall flat: Toles “was tall and muscular but still feminine in a way that was almost indescribable,” and she “had a presence that Cassidy could not describe.” More importantly, some of the technical details of the plot aren’t convincing, particularly since Toles pays more attention to Cassidy than she does to her assignment. The complex depictions of both Toles’ and Cassidy’s sexualities and personalities are refreshing, however, and the book’s climactic action scenes, though predictable, are well-paced.
Though bumpy at times, this welcome addition to the crime-fiction genre features a refreshingly new type of heroine.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615934181
Page Count: 490
Publisher: Bumbling Bard Creations
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2014
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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