An entertaining and compulsively readable thriller—on the beach or anywhere.
In this debut novel, a Cape Cod cop’s homecoming takes a deadly turn when a Secret Service agent ends up murdered and an assassination plot is discovered before the U.S. president’s vacation visit.
Who says you can’t go home again? Pepper Ryan was the former “wonderboy” of the New Albion Police Department. But three years ago, a disastrous bust gone awry compelled him to quit the force, grab his guitar, and head for Austin, Los Angeles, and Nashville. No sooner does he return home and rejoin the department than a dead Secret Service agent is found on the beach in a clambake pit with a red starfish on his chest. “Back in uniform two days and the kooky shit’s already started,” a veteran officer greets Pepper. And it shows no signs of letting up as the president plans to come to New Albion to hit up a dying but disenchanted billionaire backer for continued financial support. The unpopular president’s imminent arrival brings out the cranks and protesters and one very credible assassination threat. Pepper, who knows the area and the locals, is assigned to collaborate with the Secret Service. He works in the shadows of his retired father, the former chief of police, and his brother, “the finest young homicide detective in Boston in the last twenty years” until he is gunned down trying to foil a robbery. As for Pepper, his fellow officers have started a pool to bet how long his current tenure with the force will last. There’s nothing like a good redemption story to launch a series of procedural thrillers. But while Pepper is looking for a chance to prove himself, he doesn’t quite fit the pulp profile; he’s young, he’s handsome, and he’s not divorced, an alcoholic, or in thrall to any vices. Except for the previous flameout, he seems to be a good cop. Fagan doesn’t push a hard-boiled tone. He has a good ear for dialogue and a vivid sense of place, which he has populated with memorable and credible characters, including Pepper’s high school flame—a jet-setter whose father is the ailing benefactor hosting the president—and the two hit men who are adding to the area body count as well as old friends and new enemies who have the hero in their sights.
An entertaining and compulsively readable thriller—on the beach or anywhere.Pub Date: June 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73245-960-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Fireclay Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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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