Murder and kidnaping are only the tip of the iceberg in this extravagant, yet soberly plotted, tale of parapsychology run amok. Three years ago, Mira Morales’s husband Tom walked into a convenience store at the wrong moment and was shot to death by a thief wearing lime-green shoelaces. Now psychic Mira’s just had a horrific vision of another killing. The victim this time is criminologist/shrink Andrew Steele, who’d be renowned for his pioneering work on the Delphi project if it hadn’t been kept top secret. And for good reason: Delphi had sought out convicts with psychic powers, trained them as spies and killers for the CIA, and toppled the Carter presidency. Now three escaped Delphi subjects—telepath Vic Indrio, remote viewer Eddie Manacas, and telekinetic Hal Bennet, who sports lime-green shoelaces—have joined forces for a bad-psychics’ reunion. Their old handler Steele is their first target, and wily incoming FBI deputy director Lenora Fletcher (whom they accurately predict will be drawn into the case) their second. Meantime, though, Hal Bennet has big plans for Steele’s wife Rae, whom he spirits off to his shack in the Everglades, planning to woo her without informing her that her husband no longer presents an obstacle. Hal’s ability to reach into the minds of his enemies and victims, making them do whatever he wants or causing them blinding pain, makes him one scary guy. Even scarier is the prospect that the allegedly good guys—Rae Steele, Mira Morales (whose grandmother is also on hand to display her psychic powers), about-to-be-riffed Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy Wayne Sheppard, ruthless careerist Lenora Fletcher, and Richard Evans, Fletcher’s Deep Throat in the CIA—are so consumed with infighting that they’ll never be able to fend off all the bad karma. MacGregor (Mistress of the Bones, 1995, etc.) pulls out all the stops—you’ll find more psychics here than in the year-end issue of the National Enquirer—yet still manages to keep the pot boiling, if not quite believably, until the final surprise.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-57566-266-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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
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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