A colorful but overly complex origin story of thrills, kills, and strong wills.
A luxurious and lethal spa provides the setting for this debut thriller.
Most people wouldn’t accept an anonymous gift of a weeklong stay at an exclusive resort. But when former college professor and divorcée Charlotte “Charley” Anderson receives a calligraphed invitation to the famous Rancho Verde Spa in Santa Fe, she simply asks, “What time is check-in?” The hard-drinking New Yorker identifies herself as “new money.” A horrific accident 10 years ago scarred her physically as well as emotionally, but it also provided her with a multimillion-dollar settlement. However, her college fired her when it was revealed that she’d been having an affair with 19-year-old student Mark Bailey Elliot III. At the resort, Charley discovers that Mark’s late mother, Margaret, used to be a frequent visitor. She also finds out that Margaret and numerous other guests apparently became hooked on pills before committing suicide. Mark, who’s now married and living in Dallas, hasn’t seen Charley in a decade, but he still considers her the smartest woman he ever knew. He proves to be the financier of her spa stay, and he asks her to find out inside information about the place, which he thinks is linked to his mother’s death. PI Nash Pope, who speaks Spanish and some Navajo, also helps. Divorced Charley’s heart beats faster at the thought of being with Mark again, but a kidnapping alters those plans. The author gets points for delivering a flawed, feisty protagonist in this series starter: “Charley carried her scars like some people carry a .45—hidden, only brought out when needed.” Readers will also find the multicultural cast of characters to be welcome, and Long’s descriptions are vivid, detailing such things as a New Mexican landscape (“The soft colors of the sage and sand were backlit by the brightness of the red rock formations and the incredible blue of the sky”) and a pair of designer stilettos. The plot, however, is distractingly convoluted; even Charley marvels at everything she’s gone through.
A colorful but overly complex origin story of thrills, kills, and strong wills.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991810-8-9
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Yellow City Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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