A slyly provocative crime drama.
Carmichael’s (The Seen and the Unseen, 2014, etc.) murder mystery revolves around the discovery of a dead infant at the Supreme Court of the United States.
Detetive Sgt. Saxon of D.C. Homicide gets a call from Will Hazelton, an old college buddy and officer with the Supreme Court Police. His friend has news that’s as peculiar as it is grim: The body of a dead baby girl has been found in the courthouse. There’s no conclusive evidence suggesting how the infant got there or even if she died in utero or after birth. The initial list of suspects is forbiddingly long: At least 292 people had access to the place, including nine Supreme Court justices. The body was placed in front of the chair of Justice Mariana Martinez, whose unwavering commitment to abortion-rights jurisprudence is well-known; Saxon wonders if it was meant as a political statement. Also, the baby, like Martinez, is Hispanic. Later, Saxon discovers that the justice had recently organized a group tour of 16 Cuban nationals; the cop later becomes romantically involved with one of them despite the fact that she’s only 19. Judical clerk Susan Offerman, who’s also Hispanic, is anti-abortion and is immediately considered a suspect, but Saxon suspects that the FBI is attempting to frame her. Author Carmichael takes a titillating premise and deftly turns it into a marvelous thriller. Saxon is an intriguing mess of a man whose narration and dialogue are often very funny and wryly introspective: “You might be surprised, but I’ve had nothing but positive experiences when I date murder suspects….And the women I date are almost never the actual killer.” As the story goes on, it also offers a sensitive and intelligent treatment of the issue of abortion—at one point, Saxon’s ex-fiancee plans to terminate a pregnancy—while avoiding any hint of partisan proselytizing.
A slyly provocative crime drama.Pub Date: May 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-987667-84-4
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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