The talk is electric, the pacing breakneck, the cast colorful and empathic. After a couple of so-so efforts, Parker flat out...
Ebbetts Field, 1947. Robinson’s penciled in at first, a guy named Burke has his back, Parker benches Spenser (Back Story, 2000, etc.), and we get a gem of a book.
Ex-marine Joseph Burke was shot up so badly at Guadalcanal that it took almost a year before he could walk from one end of a minuscule apartment to the other. And while he was bed-ridden his wife betrayed and deserted him, leaving wounds on top of wounds. But Burke is endlessly tough, physically fearless, and superbly trained to kill—the ideal candidate, Brooklyn Dodgers boss Branch Rickey decides, for a job he has in mind. He’s just brought Jackie Robinson up from Montreal, he tells Burke, and plans to use him to break major-league baseball’s color line, once thought impregnable. Rickey wants Burke to be Robinson's bodyguard, to protect him from the inevitable horde of vicious types who’ll be ready to kill each and every time a black man appears in a Dodgers uniform. Can you do it? Rickey asks. “I got through Guadalcanal,” Burke replies laconically. Robinson and Burke both treat speech as if it were an endangered species, and yet almost from the first they communicate as if they were brothers. Proud, inner-directed Robinson and embittered, closed-off Burke learn to trust and depend on each other. They need to, because it’s just as Rickey foretold: the woods are full of predators, some of them as good with a gun as Burke is. When Ebbetts Field becomes a killing field and Burke makes Robinson’s cause inextricably his own, the bodyguard experiences what he least expected: the sweetness of redemption.
The talk is electric, the pacing breakneck, the cast colorful and empathic. After a couple of so-so efforts, Parker flat out nails it here.Pub Date: May 24, 2004
ISBN: 0-399-15188-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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