Good courtroom scenes can’t dispel a familiar feeling: been there, read that.
Tulsa attorney Ben Kincaid (Murder One, 2001, etc.) is still charging hard against a criminal-justice system that keeps getting it wrong. The unhappy defendant in Ben’s 11th case is Father Daniel Beale, an Episcopalian priest with an unfortunate talent for disenchanting his flock. Those who view him darkly include virtually all the parishioners in the inner circle of St. Benedict’s. So when vestrywomen Helen Conrad, Kate McGuire, and Susan Marino get knocked off faster than you can say “Vengeance is mine,” the cops have no problem looking past priestly robes—especially since Father Beale is well-known for his hair-trigger temper, and since dozens of potential witnesses heard him shout at and threaten the victims, seriatim, moments before each met her fate. But Father Beale and Ben go way back together, to a time when Ben was a boy needing a friend and found one he never forgot. Father Beale can be wrong-headed, Ben knows, tactless in the extreme, unsettlingly liberal concerning church doctrine, and downright disdainful of his own best interests, but a murderer? Never—even if his are the only fingerprints on what the prosecution claims is a murder weapon. Clearly some conniving perp hates Father Beale enough to frame him. Who in heaven’s name can that be? “You won’t believe it,” somebody tells Ben in response to his sleuthing. Well, he does, but you might not.
Good courtroom scenes can’t dispel a familiar feeling: been there, read that.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-44173-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
An improvement over The Dead Zone, with King returning to his most tried-and-true blueprint. As in The Shining, the psi-carrier is a child, an eight-year-old girl named Charlie; but instead of foresight or hindsight, Charlie has firestarting powers. She looks and a thing pops into flame—a teddy bear, a nasty man's shoes, or (by novel's end) steel walls, whole houses, and stables and crowds of government villains. Charlie's parents Vicky and Andy were once college guinea pigs for drug experiments by The Shop, a part of the supersecret Department of Scientific Intelligence, and were given a hyperpowerful hallucinogen which affected their chromosomes and left each with strange powers of mental transference and telekinesis. When Vicky and Andy married, their genes produced Charlie and her wild talent for pyrokinesis: even as a baby in her crib, Charlie would start fires when upset and, later on, once set her mother's hands on fire. So Andy is trying to teach Charlie how to keep her volatile emotions in check. But when one day he comes home to find Vicky gruesomely dead in the ironing-board-closet, murdered by The Shop (all the experimental guinea pigs are being eliminated), Andy goes into hiding with Charlie in Manhattan and the Vermont backwoods—and Charlie uses her powers to set the bad men on fire and blow up their cars. They're soon captured, however, by Rainbird, a one-eyed giant Indian with a melted face—and father and daughter, separated, spend months being tested in The Shop. Then Andy engineers their escape, but when Andy is shot by Rainbird, Charlie turns loose her atomic eyes on the big compound. . . . Dumb, very, and still a far cry from the excitement of The Shining or Salem's Lot—but King keeps the story moving with his lively fire-gimmick and fewer pages of cotton padding than in his recent, sluggish efforts. The built-in readership will not be disappointed.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1980
ISBN: 0451167805
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Handsomely written, rich with the feel and flavor of the plains—and suited mainly for those whose yearnings are in the...
Minnesotan Enger pulls out the stops in this readable albeit religiously correct debut about a family with a father who may be touched by God and a son by the Devil.
Jeremiah Land’s wife left him years ago, and now, in a midwestern town called Roofing, in 1962 or so, he’s janitor at the local school and sole parent of chronically asthmatic Reuben, 11 and the tale’s teller; his precocious sister Swede, only 9 and already an accomplished poet of western outlaw-romances; and Davy, who at 17 becomes a killer—though possibly a just one. Two town boys from the wrong side of the tracks have a grudge against custodian Jeremiah (he caught them in the girls’ locker room) and, after vowing revenge (and briefly kidnapping Swede), they appear one night in the upstairs of the Land house, whereupon Davy (did he lure them there?) bravely and determinedly shoots them dead. There’s a trial, a conviction—and then a jailbreak as Davy escapes, not to be seen for some months. Miraculous? Well, Reuben has seen his father walk on air (“Make of it what you will,” he advises the reader), and now there’s a miraculous meal (a pot of soup is bottomless), the miracle of the family’s being left an Airstream trailer—even the miracle of Jeremiah being fired, leaving the family free to take to the road after Davy. The direction they go (toward the Badlands), how they avoid the police, what people they meet (including a future wife for Jeremiah), how they find handsome Davy—all depend on what may or may not constitute miracle, subtle or wondrous, including the suspenseful events leading to a last gunfight and the biggest miracle of all (preceded by a glimpse of heaven), all followed by certain rearrangements among the lives of mortals.
Handsomely written, rich with the feel and flavor of the plains—and suited mainly for those whose yearnings are in the down-home, just-folks style of the godly.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-795-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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