Precarious politics take precedence over murder in this striking genre entry.
Private eye Max Christian helps a friend who’s running for Congress and enters a seedy world of murder, drugs, and politics in Goldman’s (The Last Minstrel Show, 2012, etc.) latest thriller.
Max’s newest case seems like an easy one at first. His friend, Edith Clift, is eyeing a congressional seat, so she hires him to follow her husband, Henry. She knows that Henry is cheating on her, but she wants proof in order to convince him to remain loyal until the election’s over. But things quickly get hairy: Max finds out that Henry has links to a Guatemalan company, which, in turn, has ties to a mob family. What’s more, Henry becomes a potential murder suspect when a singer he knows is killed. Meanwhile, Edith’s opponent, I.M. Trubble, lives up to his name; his negative ads lead Max to dig up dirt on Trubble while he searches for a killer. Despite the murder investigation, this novel is chiefly a political thriller. This works in the book’s favor, as Edith’s case is more engaging, with its Mafia-style hitmen and scandalous secrets. The bubbling campaign war, too, is intense and rightly described by Max as “ugly.” Indeed, Max isn’t even officially investigating the murder case but simply conferring with the lead investigator, his former New York Police Department partner Tina Falcone. There aren’t many suspects and no real surprises in either case, but there’s resolution across the board. Max is a whimsical protagonist with a freight of eccentricities; he partly takes Edith’s case in order to reunite with his estranged wife, Meridew, who’s Edith’s best friend; and he only has two-thirds of a right ear due to a shootout years ago and which everyone suggests should be “fixed up.” His most notable quirk, however, is the fact that he has frequent conversations with French writer and philosopher Albert Camus. Max calls him a ghost, but Goldman smartly keeps the interactions ambiguous; they could just as well be playing out in Max’s head. Their talks are often humorous—Max disguises one of them by holding a BlackBerry to his ear while in a crowded elevator—but they’re never quite as entertaining as the discussions Max has with the charmingly cynical Tina.
Precarious politics take precedence over murder in this striking genre entry.Pub Date: March 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1505908770
Page Count: 300
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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