An array of zestful characters rescues this adventure’s somewhat muddled plot.
A former Hollywood star gets caught up in drugs, terrorists, and international espionage in this globe-trotting novel.
It’s been years since Londoner Eddy Relish’s Hollywood career fizzled. Nowadays, he’s borrowing money from “Reverend” Bill Blake, a vicious man who repeatedly quotes the Bible and has an affinity for nail guns. When Eddy can’t repay a loan, Bill forces him to become a drug mule. But Chinese intelligence operative Cynthia Tzin comes to Eddy’s aid. She knows him from his days in the United States, where she’s nightclub-owning Madam Sin. Cynthia believes Eddy can be an asset in gathering intel for China. But Eddy’s earlier chance encounter with Islamic terrorist Abdul Madbul also puts him in the unique position of being the only person who can identify the evasive extremist. Cynthia will help Eddy reestablish himself in Hollywood, where he’ll essentially be bait to catch Madbul. Indeed, the terrorist knows Eddy can ID him and is therefore on the hunt. So, too, is Bill, as Eddy failed to transport the reverend’s heroin from Hong Kong. Even Eddy’s comeback is in danger: Producer Cy Sly, who played a part in crushing the actor’s career the first time, plans to do it again. Dalzell (Everything Hurts, 2014, etc.) and debut author Radley swiftly kick-start their novel, as Bill is threatening Eddy with his nail gun in little time. The plot eventually spins threads that feature numerous other characters from around the world. Bill, in particular, finds friends and foes among the Russians, the Japanese, and more. In fact, many of the supporting characters prove much more intriguing than the protagonist, including Cynthia, whose authority and prowess are never in question, and Eddy’s girlfriend, Sharon Constable, who runs for council in the couple’s London borough. Though the authors’ tight prose and abundant subplots keep the narrative moving at a steady clip, the story is occasionally perplexing. A surprise blood relation between two characters, for example, has no real bearing on the plot. And why Madbul still wants to eliminate Eddy after the terrorist’s sketch goes public remains unclear.
An array of zestful characters rescues this adventure’s somewhat muddled plot.Pub Date: April 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72830-793-0
Page Count: 284
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2019
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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