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
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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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