A clever, intricately plotted thriller.
A financially strapped advertising executive faces murder charges after a stranger approaches him with a disturbing proposition in Hargreaves’ debut novel.
Jeremy Grey is nursing a drink in a bar when a gray-haired man, watchful of the surveillance monitors, enters. Grey tells the man, “I just don’t think I can do it.” The man appears displeased, inquires about Grey’s son, and tries to convince Jeremy otherwise. When Jeremy hands him back an envelope, the man creates a scuffle, pulling out a gun and then a knife. Grey manages to grab the dropped gun and shoots the man dead. The police soon discover that the victim is District Court Judge Danton Harwell. Grey admits that he knew the man but only as “Bill”; they first met in the hospital, where Grey was visiting his critically ill son. Bill told Grey that he had terminal cancer and would pay Grey to kill him in an arranged self-defense incident so that the man’s sick wife could get insurance money for medical costs. Grey admits he needs funds for his son’s heart transplant and to fight a partner’s power grab of their ad agency, but he was handing back Harwell’s starter payment in the bar. The police believe him, especially as they uncover various discrepancies and oddities in Harwell’s life and judicial dealings. Meanwhile, Grey draws ever closer to assistant Marsha, who has been helping him deal with the recent death of his wife and other son, killed a few weeks before in a car accident. Once Harwell’s will is read, Grey is arrested. When surprisingly allowed out on bail, he finally learns the twisted role Harwell has played in his life. This first novel by Canadian advertising professional Hargreaves has an intriguing Strangers on a Train–type setup and suspenseful sequences of flashbacks and forward-moving activity featuring Grey and several other key players. While the setting of the novel remains a bit hazy (it appears to be Toronto), this investigative puzzle is largely well-paced, much like a Law & Order episode, with a few overly detailed subplot detours before its nifty wrap-up. Overall, an accomplished debut.
A clever, intricately plotted thriller.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-32-020905-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: Temerity Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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