A serpentine whodunit with amateur sleuthing, plenty of satisfying suspense, and more adventures ahead.
A teenager and his uncle investigate a Maryland murder with dangerous implications.
Dedicated to “victims of corporate greed and environmental destruction,” author and licensed acupuncturist Allen’s (The Yeti Quotient, 2011) novel incorporates elements of corruption, deception, avarice, and heroism, beginning with the at-gunpoint kidnapping of ecological engineer Andrew “Andy” Harrington. Months later, a Halloween hayride chaperone for Maryland’s historic Ellicott City school sports program discovers the bones of a young girl long entombed in the foundation of the Patapsco Female Institute, an abandoned facility previously used to house young women over a century ago. Thirteen-year-old, redheaded Jack Tasker and his uncle/caretaker Ben, a snoopy local news reporter, become curious about the discovery, especially when a more recently buried body is uncovered near the institute, which ratchets up the enigma twofold. Meanwhile, burned-out local politician Eugene Clark receives a shifty offer to form a “symbiotic relationship” with an unscrupulous multinational natural gas company to allow hydro-fracking near several key waterways like the Chesapeake Bay in exchange for his guaranteed re-election as a county executive. Clark is bullied into signing the agreement just as reports emerge that the newly excavated body is that of a young man who’d been shot to death. Believing the institute is haunted, Jack and Ben go on a clandestine fact-finding mission. This further solidifies their relationship as uncle and nephew, but also as inquisitive, if neophyte, detectives in a tale that—because of its innocuous detailing and climactic plotting—should have safe appeal for both YA and adult mystery fans. The compelling story continues to unravel with an otherworldly aspect when the two encounter an apparition and a backpack ditched in the hollow of a tree trunk. A telltale diary leads to long-held secrets that place Jack and Ben in the cross hairs of despicable corporate henchmen banking on the success of a nefarious corruption scheme. The tale is smoothly written in clipped chapters with lots of homespun tidbits, informational asides on the semantics of hydraulic fracturing, and vivid, politically charged backlash and environmental intrigue. Though the two protagonists remain charismatic and remarkably engaging throughout, both deserve more than a few pages of back story. Hopefully, readers will get to know more about the dynamic duo in future installments of Allen’s series.
A serpentine whodunit with amateur sleuthing, plenty of satisfying suspense, and more adventures ahead.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-935083-47-4
Page Count: 340
Publisher: CyPress Publications
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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