A lawyer-turned-shamus is hired to hunt up a former American serviceman's Vietnamese child—with a $50 million bequest as the stakes. A few months before he died of a stroke, telecommunications king Matthew Marshall recounted in a codicil to his will how he secretly fathered a child in a 1971 tour of Vietnam; though he never saw the child and doesn't even know its gender or its mother's present name or whereabouts, he wants it located and given half his estate. Adam Bruno, the investigator Marshall's punctilious attorneys hire to look for the child, starts with nothing more than an address book full of names and numbers of people who all agree that Marshall—hard-driving, gregarious Marshall—never talked about Vietnam. With the help of some cryptically annotated photos and a few timely anonymous letters in Vietnamese, Bruno tracks down Marshall's mates from Vietnam, but most of them—from a crazy upstate hermit who ambushes visitors to a haunted Florida abortionist to a cagey CIA op whose years in a think tank haven't made him any more forthcoming— don't want to talk either, and the ones that do can give him only the slimmest hints about Cricket, the elusive woman in Marshall's life. Crisscrossing the country by airplane and computer hookup, Bruno slowly, slowly closes in on the ancient history that everybody's so unwilling to face. Meanwhile, back in New York, someone—presumably some member of Marshall's legitimate family, all of them reluctant to see their shares of the estate cut in half—is taking strong measures (theft, espionage, homicide) to insure that Cricket's story will never come out. Occasional novelist Topor (Coda, 1984, etc.) has envisioned all this as synthetically and suspensefully as in one of his screenplays (The Accused, etc.). Breathless stuff right down to the wire: a rare civil case that comes on as strong as all those fictional actions across the hall in the criminal courtroom.
Pub Date: April 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-7868-6153-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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