Surprisingly reflective tough guys elevate an overloaded thriller.
In this military adventure, a tight-knit team goes on a mission to find who’s responsible for poisoning drug users.
In Unnecessary Evils (2010), Ramsey introduced an elite, covert special operations unit tasked with infiltrating global hot spots. Led by U.S. Army Maj. Tom Curran, the team consists of Curran’s best friend, Chief Warrant Officer Constantine “Connie” Caraballo, staff sergeants Alex Fillippi and Oscar Perez, and Chief Warrant Officer Calvin King. In this installment, set some two years after the first, the team’s equilibrium is shaken; Connie is still pulling himself together after his wife was killed in an accident, and now his cousin Sal Sontoro has died. Worse yet, the team fears their recent covert operation—to implant tracking devices in illegal drug supplies—is related to the poisoning of Sal and other drug users. As the team vows to find out the truth behind the deaths, Curran gets encouragement from a strange but oddly familiar man, who tells him, “The mission you’re on now can tip the balance of good and evil.” A series of exciting, dangerous, and often violent escapades take the men through Panama, Mexico, Florida, and Haiti, from a cruise ship to a border town to a gated jungle lair. As the team handles unexpected twists, they find themselves confronting a conspiracy at the highest levels. Ramsey’s attention to character lifts this novel above standard guys-and-guns stories. These men have emotional as well as violent work to do, and their camaraderie is touching. Some readers may disagree with aspects of the book’s ideology, particularly regarding drugs, but the characters do discuss such issues thoughtfully. Ramsey also has a good ear for snappy dialogue and seems to know his military stuff. Unlike the lean, muscular protagonists, though, the book is overweight and slow, as it’s larded with inessential logistical details, editorializing, and information dumps (“[Belize’s] largest city, Belize City, is a peninsula only 3 ½ miles wide and 2 ½ miles high. The city is home to a third of the country’s population, about 300,000 people”). Its punctuation could also have used a cleanup.
Surprisingly reflective tough guys elevate an overloaded thriller.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4575-1436-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 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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