An entertaining frontier shoot-em-up mixing rollicking action with bleak philosophizing.
A United States cavalry officer squares off against a bandit warlord in RLK’s rousing Old West adventure.
In 1880, Civil War veteran Maj. Travis Butler finds his impending retirement postponed when the one-eyed, half-Apache marauder Black Patch (motto: “Know enemy first, then kill all”) erupts from Mexico into the New Mexico Territory with his gang of 100 cutthroats, hellbent on murdering every settler he comes across. Butler pursues Black Patch with a company of the Second Cavalry regiment, helped by his longtime assistant Sgt. Noah Stubborn, the valiant but distrustful Navajo tracker Snow Bear, and one Junior Horner, the epitome of drunken Western grunge (“Bath?...It ain’t even spring yet”) who, when sober, proves to be a brilliant scout and logistics manager—and a dead shot with his Sharp Rifle. Black Patch’s trail of butchered homesteaders leads to a pitched battle at Quarter Moon Pass, then back into Mexico to Black Patch’s lair and a confrontation with 3,000 Mexican soldiers, then up north again for more perils on the road to Oklahoma. RLK’s yarn is a gritty, energetic chase narrative in which success hinges on the careful management of supplies, horses, and water rations—Travis decrees that each man can drink just one canteen every three days—as well as clever strategizing over where the enemy is headed or likely to be lying in ambush. It’s set in a tense frontier society seething with suspicion between Anglos, Indigenous Americans, and Mexicans, even when they’re fighting on the same side. RLK’s prose is vigorous and punchy, whether depicting combat scenes (“Those dead or dying were consumed by the flames; bullets from their belts began exploding causing even more chaos”) or Horner’s hard-bitten lyricism (“lately my mind’s been playing tricks with me, be sitting around thinking about the old days and after a while wonder if it really happened or was it just a dream”). The result is a vivid, bracing read.
An entertaining frontier shoot-em-up mixing rollicking action with bleak philosophizing.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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