A mostly impressive tale about criminals that will hold readers hostage.
A literary novel tells the story of a reporter’s investigation into a mysterious commune on a California mountain.
Carol, a freelance magazine journalist, comes to San Tomas looking for the missing Donna Fairchild: “Glamor girl attorney, runs with the Panthers, gets wrapped up in a murder, then vanishes for the past three years. Just because she’s not on the cover of TIME anymore, don’t believe for a moment she’s yesterday’s news.” She suspects that Donna has fallen in with Josh Clements, a controversial prison reformer who runs Moetown, a nearby mountain campground populated with ex-convicts. Josh also happens to be the cops’ first stop in every local rape case and is known to disappear every six months. Carol suspects that Josh also has something to do with the unsolved murder of a Chicano political agitator. Josh refuses to speak with her, and while his close-knit community of friends and associates—including a disabled bartender, a disgraced professor, a charming liar, and a silent murderer—answers some of her questions, who knows if she can trust what this group has to say. Carol finally manages to track down Donna and wear Josh down, but when the reformer’s brother, Paul, appears—and as the rapes continue—the story proves more complex than the journalist ever expected. Hogan’s (The Ultimate Start-Up Guide, 2017) prose is gritty and observant, particularly his descriptions of the various outlaws who populate his pages: “He’s smooth,” one character says of another. “Not slick-smooth, just smooth. Trouble is, everyone up here is pretty rough.” The novel has a bit of a shaggy-dog quality—old mysteries are answered and new ones emerge—but the diverse players are intriguing enough to pull readers through the digressions and MacGuffins. A bit of trimming would have improved the pacing, and the ending feels a bit manufactured. But its backwoods 1970s setting—Carol jokes in the first sentence that “it’s like I’m sitting with the cast of Deliverance”—and its exploration of misdeeds, trauma, and rehabilitation make for a reading experience that feels both heightened and familiar.
A mostly impressive tale about criminals that will hold readers hostage.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4808-7024-6
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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