Rebounding from last year's lackluster foray into Queens (Forced Entry), Stanley Moodrow returns to his colorful home turf of the Lower East Side (A Twist of the Knife, Force of Nature) for an exciting crime melodrama that pits the aging cop-turned- p.i. against a diabolical drug-dealer and his super-addictive designer drug, PURE. Always a smart stylist, Solomita expands his writerly horizons here by presenting the story from three primary points of view: that of Moodrow and of black lowlife Wendell Bogard, each told in the third person; and that of criminal mastermind Davis Craddock, told in the first person through his ongoing ``Autobiography.'' Although Moodrow's talewhich begins as romance-novel queen Connie Alamare hires him to get Craddock for overdosing her daughter and kidnapping her grandsonremains the focus, Craddock's memoirs prove the novel's chilling core as the white middle-class sociopathic genius reveals his devolution from an abused kid into the sexually depraved and homicidal false messiah of a Lower East Side-based psychotherapeutic cult, the Hanoverians, which recently has provided cover for dealing PURE, a heroin-coke combo more addictive than crack. Meanwhile, Wendell Bogard, hired by Craddock as his link to the black underworld, offers an ultrahip window on the action that provides much dark and tangy humor. As Moodrow homes in on Craddockwith the help of series regulars Betty Haluka, his lawyer girlfriend, and Jim Tilley, his old cop-partnerPURE-users start to turn up dead: the drug mutates lethally when heated, or smoked. Craddock runs, but not before snatching Betty, who in order to save Connie Alamare's grandsonrevealed as Craddock's sonhas tried to penetrate the Hanoverians incognito; wild with anger and fear, Moodrow kills Bogard, then tracks down Craddock for a bloody showdown. Strong, swift, and sure, but lacking the pervasive humanity and poetry of the streets that made Force of Nature (1989) a crime-thriller classic.
Pub Date: May 31, 1991
ISBN: 0-399-13593-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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
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
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