A humorous take on genre conventions in which the farce overtakes the mystery.
An Oklahoma reporter and a fairly novice shamus work a case involving presumed adultery and a strong possibility of murder in Plaster’s (Boobs, 2015, etc.) sendup of traditional whodunits.
Henrietta Hebert, employed at a weekly newspaper in Henryetta, Oklahoma, is sure to be late for her first online course examining classic love tales. She’s waiting on her mom, Wynona Sue, who has exciting news: she’s met the love of her life, professor Alexander Lehough. Two days later, though, Wynona Sue is devastated, certain that Alex is having an affair. She bases this on the fact that Alex said the name “Zander” in his sleep, but she’s unaware that it’s Alex’s name for his own alter ego, with whom he has regular, internal conversations. It also turns out that Alex hasn’t quite divorced his estranged wife, Charlene; meanwhile, she and her lover, Virgil Carter, are in hiding after narrowly escaping a political assassin. Charlene’s attempts to get her hands on Alex’s alleged Nobel Prize winnings lead her to private eye Max Morgan. Alex’s divorce attorney had hired Max, a die-hard fan of TV and film detectives, to track down Charlene. However, Max may have a juicier case involving an anonymous note implying that someone’s been killed. Henrietta, too, investigates—especially after Max accuses her mother of murder. This amusing murder-mystery lampoon largely hits the mark. It’s not really a true mystery to readers, who quickly find out the note’s origin, but they’ll still find it a treat to watch the characters scramble for answers they doubtlessly won’t find; at one point, for instance, Max toys with the idea that the nonexistent Zander is a murder victim. There are some satirical bits, with the best involving Henrietta’s classmates, who use lectures on classic love stories to launch independent stances on sexism and discrimination. Nevertheless, Max is the standout here; he’s so lost in his world of noir that he even mixes up a cop’s name with that of a character in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series. The author might have used a little restraint, though, as Max’s tough-guy drawl (“For you, Honey, no charrrge”) is relentless; some cultural references can also be excessive, such as an ample recap of the plot of the 2015 sci-fi movie Ex Machina.
A humorous take on genre conventions in which the farce overtakes the mystery.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9914480-6-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Mossik Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
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
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