Hangdog Tulsa lawyer Ben Kincaid (Cruel Justice, 1996, etc.) is stuck with another hopeless case—a mayor who allegedly killed his wife and daughters. How's this for an original opening? Handsome, magnetic Wallace Barrett, a former football player turned politician, has a public argument with his wife over their two young girls; hours later, a neighbor who's heard cries from his house sees Barrett bolting the scene, leading the police on a dramatic high-speed chase until he crashes his car into a three-count indictment. Faster than you can say O.J., Barrett's retained feckless Ben, whom he's convinced is on the likely trial judge's good books. Barrett figures he'll need all the help he can get, because his late wife's sister, buff exercise counselor Cynthia Taylor, is already peddling a book about him larded with allegations of domestic abuse, and the D.A.'s office, headed by Ben's nemesis Jack Bullock, has stopped looking for another suspect. Meantime, Ben, who's been struggling to take care of the apathetic nephew his decamped sister's parked with him, keeps flashing back to painful memories of his own late father's indictment for murder. He's being sued by a TV station for smashing a camcorder (in defense of Cynthia Taylor, no less). And he's being stalked by someone who keeps threatening him with the tag line ``Sick heart . . . You're next.'' Will Ben's investigator be able to identify the suspicious figure spotted taking money from the sleazy acting mayor? Will Barrett take the stand in his own defense? Will Ben, like Lt. Columbo, eventually realize what most readers will have seen from the beginning? Will all the evidence finally come together with a single satisfying snap? Yes, yes, yes, no. Ben turns in a creditable job in the courtroom (and runs a mean five-minute mile), but not even the dream team could pull all the threads of this tangled case together.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-345-38685-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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