An often engrossing thriller.
Debut novelist Scarborough’s gritty Western mystery blends thrills with a deft take on political manipulation.
Former Texas Ranger Oswald “Oz” Nightingale is in a rut. After a particularly dark case involving the death of a friend, and another in which he was wrongfully accused of theft, he quit the Rangers and struck out on his own. But he did truly love serving his community, so when a friend in the governor’s office offers him a job, he jumps at the chance. With drought threatening, Oz is tasked with convincing Constance Dearborn, a stubborn landowner, to sell, which would allow the state to build a new reservoir and guarantee clean water for his beloved hometown of Broken Rock, among many others. Oz attempts to strike a fair deal and shield Mrs. Dearborn from the harsh reality of an eminent-domain seizure. But matters are more complicated than they seem, and soon threats, potentially violent environmental activists, and even family feuds come into play. When Mrs. Dearborn turns up dead and a teenager named Cayden becomes a prime suspect, Oz has to choose between the law and the greater good in a world filled with less-than-honest characters and shifting, hidden motives. The story is fast-paced and engaging, with a breadth of secondary characters standing with or against Oz. Scarborough does an impressive job of making sure that these characters are distinct and memorable, so that readers won’t lose the thread among the twists and turns. Likewise, the prose is mostly strong and direct, providing illuminating descriptions, although characters’ names are sometimes overused, in lieu of pronouns: “Nightingale and McGowan had been in touch through the years. Nightingale knew McGowan worked hard to get to be the right-hand man to the governor, so he was not surprised at McGowan’s status.”
An often engrossing thriller.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-938749-40-7
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Enchanted Indie Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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