A hard-boiled crime drama that lacks well-defined characters or a comprehensible plot.
A luckless gambler goes on the run after refusing a mission from a loan shark in Downs’ (Penchant for Vengeance, 2017, etc.) novella.
In this brief noir pastiche, desperate, recovering alcoholic Johnny Chapman passes out during a card game from an unspecified condition. He regains consciousness after one of the other players finds pills in his pocket and shoves them in his mouth; Johnny had been prescribed them by a man in a white lab coat. However, he then loses the rest of his chips. He tries to drink away his sorrows and has a brief encounter with former girlfriend Gwendoline, who’s mixed up in vague troubles of her own. She watches Johnny get severely beaten in the bar, then later threatens to shoot him while rehashing the end of their past relationship. The next day, she gets fired from her job, punches her boss, and get knocked over by a teenager in the street. Meanwhile, a loan shark, whose money Johnny lost in the poker game, threatens to kill him if he doesn’t inject a racing dog with a hormone that will somehow make it lose a race. (They already tested the hormone on Johnny, while he was sleeping.) Johnny reluctantly agrees but ultimately can’t bring himself to do it. While on the lam, he robs a bank, gets robbed twice, and gets into a lot of fights with strangers. The story is full of confusing contradictions, incomprehensible motivations, and dropped plot threads; for example, after the opening scene, neither the headaches nor the pills are mentioned. The violence is miraculously consequence-free, and Johnny kills several people—including a convenience-store clerk—without remorse. It’s all set in a version of Albuquerque where everybody still uses Blackberrys and police are mostly absent. Downs also offers cartoonish dialogue (“If your trap opens again, I’ll hit you so hard your grandchildren will feel the blow”) and elaborately mixed metaphors (“Maybe it was some dream on some horizon that was just out of reach, pushing and pulling him, and bouncing him around like a red rubber ball on an open field”).
A hard-boiled crime drama that lacks well-defined characters or a comprehensible plot.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62694-817-4
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Black Opal Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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