Bloated but bouncy, bound for big sales.
DeMille’s biggest yet deserves high points for entertainment and readability, though nothing of his has been as moving or richly written as 1990’s The Gold Coast.
Up Country is a sequel to The General’s Daughter (1992), filmed with John Travolta as DeMille’s Army homicide detective Paul Brenner. Despite DeMille liking the film, it stuck closely to his plot and was a gloomy dud. Though lighter in tone, Up Country also turns on a bloody central event and an imponderable moral problem: Brenner’s old boss Colonel K. Karl Hellman, head of the Criminal Investigation Division, calls the retired Chief Warrant Officer Brenner back in for a special op. Brenner’s sent back to Vietnam, where he did two tours during the war (as did Lt. Nelson DeMille), to look into a murder that took place 30 years ago. A Vietnamese soldier wrote a letter to his brother, later recovered by the CID, that told of an American captain shooting a fellow lieutenant in the Treasury Building within the Citadel in Quan Tri City, then looting the treasury’s safe. This monster later ran a black market that rewarded him with big money. Colonel Hellman actually knows who this captain is, but wants Brenner to investigate cold and see what he can find out as hard evidence for a military trial. Brenner lands in Saigon and falls in with Susan Weber, a businesswoman who sticks to him throughout his investigation and is, of course, far more deadly than she seems. This gives DeMille a chance to warm up his earlier fancy sophisticated dialogue between Brenner and CID rape investigator Cynthia Sunhill from The General’s Daughter, although Susan, while mysterious, sexy and dangerous, turns out to be a less ingenious foil than Cynthia throughout several hundred pages of two-person dialogue that only too often rehashes what we already know. The climax lands Brenner in the same hot water that got him retired/fired.
Bloated but bouncy, bound for big sales.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2002
ISBN: 0-446-54657-0
Page Count: 700
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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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