An assassination tale that, when it isn’t moping about failed marriages, grapples with the gender paradox that turns nurturing women into vicious killers. After a bomb fails to blow up Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, represented by a Scripture-spouting Irish priest and his dying-millionaire buddy, hire the world’s best assassin, a mysterious character known only as the Gorgon. Responsible for the kind of comically fiendish deaths that might have played well on the old Avengers TV show, this notorious killer is actually a fabulously wealthy, cross-dressing, bisexual female named Kristain Somberg, who lives in a book-lined Swiss castle and has nightly orgies with a gang of psycho-sexpots, accompanied by Prokofiev piano concertos. After studying her prey, Somberg concludes that Thatcher loves children and sweets. Baking a poisoned cake is easy—but where will she find the innocent child who—ll offer Thatcher a deadly slice? Somberg flies to Chicago in her private jet, the Pequod, and snatches six-year-old Danny, son of widowed globe-trotting ad photographer Jessica Moore. Rescued from despair by a set of Beethoven symphonies given to her by Danny’s legless full-time care-giver, Pit Martin, Jessica vows to find the boy and has the great luck in London of meeting Commander Trent Stanford, a dashing, conveniently divorced Scotland Yard special agent assigned to thwart IRA assassinations. Newcomer Forest compares their burgeoning romance with the perverse passions Somberg has for her male secretary, a narcissistic Hawaiian named Kim Lee whom she’s transforming into a woman. Add to this some complications concerning an IRA mole in Thatcher’s organization. Will Maggie take her cake? Will a brainwashed Danny prefer the big toys and violent thrills he gets with his “new” mother to the middle-class monotony of life with Jessica? Archly, if not absurdly, implausible, with an excess of cumbersome dialogue and tedious allusions to Melville, Nietzsche, and contemporary clothing designers.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20466-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
