The best novel so far from Tine (Midnight City, 1986, etc.): a richly colored suspenser about an all-black US Army unit in Rome in 1944, just after the Nazis have left. Art investigator Harry Leblanc is hired by art-dealer Peony Seagrave to look into the provenance of a valuable 17th-century painting by Guido Reni that has turned up in Harlem and been offered to her for disposal by Roberta Chapman, a cleaning woman and granddaughter of the late James Holt. The work is authentic, but how did Holt come by it? Leblanc's hound-doggery leads him into the novel's main subject—Rome's WW II black market and how Holt's black army unit found itself tied into the illegal dealings of its white sergeants and its no-good rich-boy lieutenant, Austin Kinney, the company's second-in-command. The ringleader of the black-market operation is Sgt. Eddie Manganaro, a hood with a lust for Mafia ties—and here he is, on the home grounds! Not that he hasn't made his bones back in the States, with his specialty, an ice pick into the ear. Manganaro draws Lt. Kinney and two fellow noncoms, McManus and Utterback, into an arrangement he's made with Rome's top Mafia boss, Lorenzetti, who sneers at Manganaro's Sicilian ties back home. They will deliver $15,000 worth of hams, canned goods, etc., to Lorenzetti's black-market warehouse once weekly. The sergeants and Kinney, however, have no intention of paying their drivers from the all-black Heavy Transport Division, and instead try to strong- arm the blacks—who, including Private James Holt, rob the secret cache of the sergeants and Lt. Kinney and refuse to return what they've stolen. Then the most foulmouthed, hate-spieling sergeant freezes one of the blacks in a freezer and a bloodletting bedlam erupts. Tightknit all the way, with strong characterizations, terrific dialogue, and a grand sense of street-life in a starving Rome.
Pub Date: Feb. 20, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-06907-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
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
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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