In showing what it’s really like on a cold night when God and Santa Claus are both watching, Phillips provides the perfect...
One thing’s for sure: This tale of a halfhearted embezzler struggling to escape from town (Wichita, Kansas) with his ill-gotten gains is not your average Christmas Eve story.
Charlie Arglist is a man of many talents. He used to practice law. He can still duck a speeding ticket without half trying. He has an eye for the ladies, and for strippers who don’t pretend to be ladies. And he runs the odd errand for Vic Cavanaugh, who’s been cooking the books on the operations he shares with Bill Gerard. Now that snow is blanketing the countryside, and joints like Tease-O-Rama and the Sweet Cage are empty except for customers scurrying home from Midnight Mass, Charlie plans to rendezvous with Vic and take off—just as soon as he’s made his last rounds of his old haunts, doling out holiday tips to Dusti, Francie, and Cupcake, leaving an indiscreet photo as an unsought Christmas gift to Sweet Cage manager Renata, and taking one last peek at the children who have no idea he’s leaving. Gradually, though, Charlie’s plans start to unravel. His brother-in-law ruins his getaway car. Vic isn’t waiting for Charlie at his house. Enforcers are on his trail. The weather is getting worse and worse. And that’s all before people start killing each other, with Charlie, sleepwalking through his abortive escape plans, watching numbly as the corpses pile up around him. First-timer Phillips, batting Charlie like a pinball from one flipper to the next and back again, commands a gorgeous array of tones from ribald comedy to sad-sack pathos to breathtakingly abrupt brutality, producing the shaggiest caper you’ve ever read.
In showing what it’s really like on a cold night when God and Santa Claus are both watching, Phillips provides the perfect corrective to all those treacly seasonal fables that get left under Christmas trees by the gross.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2000
ISBN: 0-345-44018-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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