Exchanging the snipers of previous books (Point of Impact, 1993, etc.) for a gang of murderers on the lam, Hunter unleashes a memorable orgy of testosterone and bloodlust, delivering a wickedly mature thriller in the process. Made to flee relative contentedness in a maximum-security Oklahoma prison after killing a black inmate, lifelong white-trash bad boy Lamar Pye enlists the aid of his lumbering idiot cousin, Odell, and artist-cum-convict Richard Peed to engineer a hasty jailbreak before undertaking a desperate exodus from the law. Enter Bud Pewtie, an Oklahoma highway patrolman who seems modeled after a statue of a statue of John Wayne. Though chiseled from dolomite, Bud is showing a few cracks: an affair with his partner's nubile, freckly wife and a midlife crisis that verges on plainspoken existential despair. Stumbling into an ambush, Bud gets promptly and repeatedly shot; his partner gets killed. Vendetta formed, a story that had dangled several tantalizing plot twists narrows to a sly variation on the basic gunfighter yarn, with a dash of detective work thrown in. Hands less skilled than Hunter's (he is the OED of firearms) might send such a miasma of random violence, perverse criminal clansmanship, and dogged retribution straight to snoozeville. But the novel is rescued by the deeply zonked Lamar, who appears to have wandered out of the same scorched wilderness (in this case, a desolate Western landscape) that gave us Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Lamar's lessons on the vanished criminal arts (counterpointing Bud's Sunday-dinner tableau) guide his rogue brood to the blood-soaked consecration of a bizarre family romance: Daddy Lamar, his prison-groupie girlfriend Ruta Beth Tull as Mom, Richard as their disappointing son, and Odell as the ``innocent'' Baby. Splendid, raunchy writing, which proposes that between the violently deranged and the unrelentingly lawful there dwells a variety of armed-to-the-teeth wistful bad guys that no one wants to meet.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43751-7
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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