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
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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