Addicting characters and gadgets.
A man’s new Dallas PI business becomes personal when someone abducts a loved one in Langer’s (Personal Verdict, 2011) thriller.
Jack Crocker can’t cope with his PTSD from the Gulf War and his time in Iraq. His struggle with alcohol is the reason his wife, Crystal, is seeking a divorce, and it indirectly caused the accident that crippled his young son. Remedying his mistakes starts with opening C&M Investigations, a PI agency, with his nephew (and former Marine) Jimmy McGuire. At first, business is slow, but things heat up when Meredith Thomas, the personal assistant to the CEO at Templeton Corporation, hires the duo to sleuth out who tried to run her over in the company parking lot. It only escalates from there: Meredith seems to be hiding from someone dangerous, and an employee at Templeton Corporation turns up dead. Then one of Jack’s family members is kidnapped to warn him off the case; now Jack just needs to figure out which case. Though the mystery takes a while to begin (Meredith appears about one-third of the way in), Langer fully develops his cast. Jack and Jimmy, for example, swap stories: Jack tells of inadvertently injuring his son, while Jimmy recalls a horrific experience in Afghanistan. But the character development also helps set up the story for later, more suspenseful sequences, like Jack getting little help from local police when he needs it. The book ultimately leads to an exhilarating scene in which Jack and Jimmy track down the mysterious abductors, who not only threaten his family, but Meredith as well. There are also welcome lighter moments, especially Jimmy’s obsession with gadgets; he puts to good use a Batmobile-esque remote-controlled car mounted with cameras and a recording device disguised as a pen. Langer only falters with his editing, including giving different names and job titles for the same murder victim. The ending, complete with epilogue, offers a thorough resolution.
Addicting characters and gadgets.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692240434
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ralph\Langer
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
