Joshua Rabb, a transplanted Brooklynite lawyer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1940s, is the only person who can understand the Yiddish ramblings of the survivor of an execution on one of the Papago reservations outside Tucson. That's how Rabb (Versions of the Truth, 1994, etc.) ends up in the crossfire between Meyer Lansky, the New York mobster who keeps trying to raise the money to keep cash-strapped Vegas visionary Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo Hotel alive, and Frank Costello, top capo of the New York Commission (represented locally by Joe Bonanno), who wants to bankrupt Siegel so he can muscle in on a bigger slice of the Flamingo pie. Lansky keeps sending mules to set up a Mexican heroin deal on Siegel's behalf; somebody (Costello? Bonanno? some ambitious lieutenant?) keeps killing them. It's all too complicated for a simple family man like Rabb, who wants nothing more than to go on supplementing his meager BIA income by building his private practice (latest indigent client: a Papago high-school kid accused of kidnapping, raping, and murdering a girl who wouldn't go out with him; his defense is that the killer was the girl's father, who'd been abusing her for years) and making a home for his teenage daughter, Hanna (latest romantic interests: Lansky's son Buddy and Bonanno's son Bobby). Tangling with real-life 1947 gangsters gives dogged Rabb's crusades a new edge and resonance—but also a license for the wholesale violence and overwrought heroics Parrish presents so often and so unconvincingly. Save this one for your beach bag.
Pub Date: Feb. 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93852-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
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