The characters are thinly defined in this thriller, but the pace is nonstop.
The gritty violence of a human-trafficking ring in Atlanta takes center stage in the second volume of this romantic suspense series.
Kiernan-Lewis (Wit’s End, 2016, etc.) brings back the detective duo of Mia Kazmaroff and Jack Burton, whom she introduced in 2014’s Reckless. The two quickly find themselves in danger after they agree to help José, an injured Hispanic man; he escaped from kidnappers and is trying to find his abductee sister, Maria. Just hours after José bunks down in Jack’s house for the night, he’s murdered and the place is burned to the ground. Jack wants to find the killer, and Mia wants to hunt for Maria, who, it turns out, is undergoing a hellish experience as a sex slave. Naturally, the two goals dovetail. Jack is a former police officer and now a part-time personal chef; Mia is an unemployed civilian with an unusual gift: she’s “able to tell the history and genus of any object just by touching it.” They teamed up after working to solve the murder of Mia’s brother, Dave, who’d been Jack’s partner in the Atlanta police department. That’s about all the back story readers get about the couple; however, their underlying sexual tension and constant bickering—not to mention the appearance of a rival for Mia’s affection—keep their dance interesting. Ultimately, though, the overall lack of character development restricts the novel to surface-level action. This is a plot-driven thriller that offers constant twists—some expected but others unanticipated. Kiernan-Lewis offers enough red herrings to keep readers guessing, as almost all the bit players are potential suspects in the trafficking conspiracy. Are the leads provided by Liz Magnuson, the head of Atlantans Against Modern Slavery, legitimate? Is Trey Bowers from the Atlanta field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement really a government agent? The final surprise should make fans want a sequel.
The characters are thinly defined in this thriller, but the pace is nonstop.Pub Date: June 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5002-2128-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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