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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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