A talented author tackles the real-world opioid crisis in a well-plotted law enforcement thriller.
A gang of crackerjack covert operatives becomes entangled in a Mexican drug cartel’s business in May’s (Horses Cry, 2016) thriller.
This gritty, compelling crime novel offers a story of deadly drug-smuggling operations and the covert operatives focused on intercepting them. Among the cast of seasoned war veterans are two retired U.S. Army Rangers—Capt. Antoine Pomerleau and Sgt. Jon Gomez—and retired Cpl. Audy Murphy of the Canadian military, who are all part of a covert Black Ops team whose goal is to apprehend and dethrone the powerful Mexican drug lord known as El Loco. May puts readers directly into the action from the opening pages, and he’s in fine form as Pomerleau, commissioned by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, leads his group to exterminate some drug runners at a secret compound. Using grenades, sniper fire, and other gunplay, the trio manages to accomplish their mission, but the problem is far from solved. Intelligence executives tell the men that El Loco’s ruthless Cinalo Cartel has again begun using the rodeo circuit to traffic and distribute fentanyl and opioids across the Canadian border, using horse trailers. A plan is hatched to use undercover operatives as rodeo competitors (including an experienced rider named Bella) and report back to the DEA and Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The team embarks on a slow-burn investigation, but when hostages are taken and a blackmail scheme ensues, things heat up. Over the course of this novel, May offers fiery scenes that crackle with edgy suspense and nail-biting tension. The author certainly knows his way around the complex dynamic of Special Forces operations, details of choice weaponry, and the vernacular of undercover operatives, and that knowledge delivers the kind of authenticity that will keep readers engaged until the satisfying ending. The final pages deliver an exciting climax and a temporary resolution for his main characters, even as drug trafficking problems proliferate.
A talented author tackles the real-world opioid crisis in a well-plotted law enforcement thriller.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5255-4177-3
Page Count: 234
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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