Warmed-over Florida noir from rolling-stone novelist Watson (Blind Tongues, 1988). When the inoffensive botanist who came to see her boss, Clinton Reynolds, at the Florida Bureau of Water Management disappears along with every computerized trace of his visit, Corey Darrow wangles an introduction to Eddie Priest, a college football legend turned lawyer—not knowing that Eddie's been bullied into retirement and is making a living selling sailboats. Eddie hears Corey out, takes her for a therapeutic mini-cruise aboard the Sight Unseen, doesn't quite seduce her, sends her on her way with the usual assurances, and hears the next morning that she's drowned, a .357 Smith and Wesson clutched in her hand, in a canal her car ran into on the way home. The setup would be obvious to anybody who'd ever read a book, but Eddie and Corey's lookalike sister Sawnie never have, and you wouldn't believe how long it takes them to convince themselves that Corey was run off the road by sociopathic Creek Indian Harry Feather, who got a little carried away executing agribusiness magnate Lofton Coltis's orders to give Corey a serious scare. Coltis is out to protect his empire from the secret the mysterious botanist had dug up; Eddie is stung by guilt to avenge Corey; Sawnie wants vengeance too, but not if it means revealing her illicit romance and aborting her congressional campaign; Harry's first love, Moira Breath, back from Barnard with practical law knowledge, wants to reclaim Coltis's land for her tribe; Harry just likes to lean on people. Watson writes as if he had one complicated tale to tell—his incantatory approach to Florida landscapes and human relations is right out of John D. MacDonald at his windiest—but ends up resolving all his problems by wholesale manslaughter instead of developing the conflicts within. Six corpses, all without a clue.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-87135-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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
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