An absorbing and highly charged story of violent payback with considerable collateral damage.
Ex-cops, killers, and junkies collide in and around San Francisco in this thriller.
In Pitts' (Knuckleball, 2017, etc.) novel, 20-year-old Steven suffers a brutal beating by men who steal his weed and leave him lying on gravel in the small town of Willits, California. Quinn McFetridge, a stranger, offers him a ride and a cigarette, but his motives aren’t altruistic. Just out of prison, he tricks Steven into helping him rescue a girl named Teresa, who he claims is his daughter, from living with a speed freak in San Francisco. En route to the city, the ex-con and Steven stop at a vineyard owned by someone Quinn calls an old friend; soon he’s a dead one. Cokehead and ex-cop Maurice Tremblay finds the vineyard owner with a puddle of blood “still growing around his body.” Tremblay discerns Quinn is the murderer. The two share a complicated back story, and for reasons yet unknown to the reader, they both want to find Teresa. Tremblay works for Ricardo Alvarez—aka Richard Allen, “a Mexican cartel guy, supposedly gone legit”—whose tentacles reach into San Francisco’s “City Hall and upward.” Widowed, retired cop Carl Bradley, assisting in finding the vintner’s killer, contacts some sources, and then he too heads to the city, looking for Quinn, Tremblay, and Teresa. Steven finds her among addicts in the Mission District. Frail-looking and bruised from shooting up, Teresa connects with Steven. They go on the run, especially from Quinn, who brutally murders anyone who can identify him. From here, the pace of the lively tale accelerates, and the reason why Teresa is hunted and the truth about her identity are revealed. The characters are well-defined: bored, lonely Carl, devoted to his dog, Buford; Quinn, with an appetite for steak and an appreciation of the power of a muscle car; and fleshy-cheeked Tremblay, a devotee of loose women and top-shelf liquor. The author’s attention to small details is a big plus—a mattress bends under Tremblay’s weight; a reporter’s eyeglasses look opaque with fingerprints—but identifying the make of every vehicle stolen or involved in a chase pockmarks the engrossing text.
An absorbing and highly charged story of violent payback with considerable collateral damage.Pub Date: June 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943402-84-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Down & Out Books
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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