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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Much will be made of the kinship of Hill and his superstar father, Stephen King, but Hill can stand on his own two feet....
A rock star buys a ghost who chases him from New York to Florida, blood spurting all the way.
Jude Coyne, after a career in the darker reaches of the rock-music world, lives in upstate New York with Georgia, the latest in a succession of young pierced admirers he calls by the states of their birth. Georgia’s predecessor, Florida, is at the heart of the troubles that arrive when Coyne answers an ad offering a ghost, something special to add to his collection of creepy items that includes a Mexican snuff film. The ghost inhabits a garish suit of clothes that arrives in a heart-shaped box, and the situation is a set-up. Knowing Coyne’s taste for the weird, Florida’s sister has inveigled him into buying the soul of her and Florida’s stupendously evil stepfather, Craddock, a stinker who learned a lot of very bad magic as a soldier in Vietnam. The motive is the apparent suicide of Florida, who Coyne sent home after one too many bouts of depression. Craddock’s ghost immediately gets into Coyne’s head, urging him to murder Georgia and then commit suicide. Coyne resists, but the bad vibes are too much for his gay personal assistant, who flees the farm and hangs himself. Craddock persists in his attack on Coyne, using a ghostly truck as his assault vehicle. Lesser rock stars would have capitulated early on, but Georgia turns out to be full of spunk, and Coyne’s German Shepherds are fierce protectors who the ghost greatly fears. To get rid of Craddock, Coyne figures he will have to go to Florida to find out just what did happen to make that ghost such an abusive spirit.
Much will be made of the kinship of Hill and his superstar father, Stephen King, but Hill can stand on his own two feet. He’s got horror down pat, and his debut is hair-raising fun.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-114793-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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