An entertaining, if somewhat overwhelming, adventure tale.
A swashbuckling adventure novel, the first in a planned trilogy, that tells the story of modern-day pirate Bobby McAllister.
Novelist Granger Lawton suffers from a lack of material for his second book. His publisher insists that he leave the comforts of his Arizona ranch to interview a 20th-century pirate and Southern gentleman named Bobby McAllister, in order to write a book based on McAllister’s life. Lawton feels that he doesn’t have a choice but to go and hear what the man has to say, but he finds McAllister’s tall tales of adventure and treasure hunting in the Caribbean difficult to believe. McAllister tells him a story of how, after fleeing law enforcement officials in Georgia, he became mixed up with an eclectic group of treasure hunters looking to find and recover the Hacha, a 17th-century Spanish ship. His path to eventual success included sexy, mysterious women; crooked, vengeful cops; a talking parrot; and, unfortunately, the deaths of close friends. He then tells Lawton that his life’s true calling has been to find a different, more elusive treasure, and he enlists the reluctant writer in his quest to find a legendary ship known as the Prize. The novel jumps back and forth in time quite a bit, and, as a result, the plot grows somewhat confusing, and it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of all of the colorful characters. Readers probably won’t mind terribly much, however, as they’re likely to get swept up by the charismatic McAllister’s enthusiasm. Debut author Ferguson based McAllister’s story on his own life experiences salvaging treasure from sunken ships, and he blended fact with fiction and fantasy to create a posthumously published trilogy. As readers try to guess what’s true and what’s invented, they’re likely to find the novel enjoyable on a whole other level.
An entertaining, if somewhat overwhelming, adventure tale.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-1770671485
Page Count: 480
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2013
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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