A fun, slightly dangerous drive through the car-culture canyon.
From Beauchamp (Skintight, 2014), a novel about adventures in and around a 1963 Ford Galaxie.
Behold, Ford’s 60 millionth car: “A 1963½ Galaxie 500 XL Sport Roof, Rangoon Red on black, Z-code 390, 4-speed transmission.” So begins the story of a vehicle that will see more than its share of adventures. For its first seven years and 141,970 miles, a Lewisville man drives the car up and down the state highways. Throughout its life, the Galaxie is driven, fixed, and loved by many as it wheels through teenage drag racing, picks up women of questionable character, and has a close encounter with a opossum. Eventually, a mechanic in the year 2042 says, “I was struck by just how different the Galaxie was….Built not just for speed, but for sex appeal.” This future is a funny one in which internal combustion engines are banned (thanks, readers are told, to the “Gore Act”) and Siri-like voices have become a bit too powerful: “ ‘Shut up, you jabbering bitch,’ I pounded my fist on the dash. The car’s voice didn’t miss a beat, telling me I had travelled seventeen miles with no apparent destination.” When the Galaxie isn’t being driven, it’s being repaired or longed for: “She didn’t want the car, but she’d taken it because she knew how bad it would hurt Dorsey to lose it.” The narrative—as speedy as the title suggests—roars with engine-speak (“The 390 initially refused to confine its combustion to the internal side. It leaked oil like a sieve and smoked like a freight train”) and devil-may-care drivers/passengers/admirers: “ ‘This is a nice car,’ she said. ‘I gave my first blowjob in a car like this.’ ” All the while, clean prose details the complex human-machine relationship, which, Beauchamp shows, ages well. “I see only the machine’s after-image,” says one of the Galaxie’s many drivers, “a flickering zoetrope ghost in the place it, and I, had been only seconds earlier.” Though embracing car culture, the tale gives a little slap on the butt for good measure.
A fun, slightly dangerous drive through the car-culture canyon.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-939156-04-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Ink Smith Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Thriller fans will find so much space devoted to Gia and Jake’s sexual acrobatics that little time is left for the plot to...
A small Tennessee mountain town is awash in sex and scandal in Belle’s first novel.
Gia Andrews, a disaster relief worker, is also a convicted murderer’s daughter. Her father, Ray, was convicted of killing his wife and Gia’s stepmother, Ella Mae, and sentenced to life in prison. But Ray is dying, and prison officials are releasing him on compassionate grounds; Gia’s uncle Cal, a prominent lawyer, has recruited her to return home from Kenya to care for her dad in his home in Rogersville. Despite the fact that she hasn’t seen her father since she left many years ago, she returns, believing her brother, Bo, and sister, Lexi, will help her, but she finds that neither wants anything to do with their father. Her nearest allies turn out to be the home-care worker Uncle Cal has hired, Fannie, and the new man she meets, a bar-and-grill owner named Jake. When Gia meets a law professor planning to write a book about wrongful convictions, he tells her he believes Ray didn’t kill Ella Mae and that Cal, who was Ray’s attorney, didn’t mount much of a defense. After looking into these allegations, Gia discovers her stepmother had an affair with another man and wonders whether her father could be innocent after all. While trying to unravel the mystery of who really killed Ella Mae, things heat up between Gia and Jake, and suddenly the mystery takes a whole new direction. Belle’s a smooth writer whose characters are vibrant and truly reflect the area where the novel is set, but the plot—while clever—takes a back seat to Gia’s and Ella Mae’s separate, but equally steamy, sexual exploits.
Thriller fans will find so much space devoted to Gia and Jake’s sexual acrobatics that little time is left for the plot to develop.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1722-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
The late (d. 1988), leathery, awesomely unstoppable (over 100 books still in print) L’Amour, still producing fluently from his grave (End of the Drive, 1997), offers one more gathering of unpublished tales, proving again that great writing laughs at death. Showing sheer contempt for slow openings, L’Amour’s seven newly discovered short stories offer some breath-catching first paragraphs echoing with the cold steel click of a Colt .45 hammer being cocked. The lead story, “The Man from Utah,” polishes L’Amour’s walnut prose to its glossiest grain. Bearing a fearsome reputation as a gunfighter, Marshall Utah Blaine arrives in Squaw Creek to investigate 14 recent murders (three were marshals) by a cunning bandit masquerading as an upright citizen. By a process of deduction, the shrewd Blaine narrows his suspects down until he has the killer. “Here Ends the Trail” opens with a High L’Amouresque Miltonic Inversion: “Cold was the night and bitter the wind and brutal the trail behind. Hunched in the saddle, I growled at the dark and peered through the blinding rain. The agony of my wound was a white-hot flame from the bullet of Korry Gleason.” This builds to an explosive climax that mixes vengeance with great-heartedness. “Battle at Burnt Camp,” “Ironwood Station” and “The Man from the Dead Hills” all live up to the melodrama of their blue-steel titles. “Strawhouse Trail” opens memorably with the line: “He looked through his field glasses into the eyes of a dying man.” And never lets up. The title novella tells of Lona Markham’s unwilling engagement to six-foot-five, 250-pound, harsh-lipped Frank Mailer, who has “blue, slightly glassy eyes.” Will Lance Kilkenny, the mysterious Black Rider, save her from indestructible Mailer? Stinging stories of powerful men against landscapes you can strike a match on.
Pub Date: May 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-10833-6
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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