A gripping, brutal tale of revenge and devastation.
In the wake of the Civil War, a former Southern sheriff reluctantly chases a man bent on vicious, bloody retribution.
In Harms’ (Infamous Vol. 1, 2011) historical novel, Samuel Glazer is a man seeking revenge. He has a list of eight members of Bloody Bill’s gang, which rampaged through Missouri during the Civil War. Glazer’s wave of vengeance takes place in a South that has been decimated by the conflict; entire towns are ravaged, and people are scrounging to feed themselves. After the ruthless deaths of Harold Camp’s wife and son, Oliver Hansford, a wealthy man in Whitwell, Tennessee, forces Lee Sinclair, the ex-sheriff, to track down the murderer with two associates. Despite the misgivings of his wife, Kate, and his own doubts, Lee sets off with Eli and Bobby to hunt for the killer. Back in town, Kate is trying to survive with their son, Jeremiah, while fending off the advances of Hansford. On his journey, Glazer saves a black freeman named Joseph from being lynched and tries to protect him. After several encounters on the road, Lee realizes that Eli and Bobby are barbarous murderers and that he is not supposed to survive this operation. The three searchers are keen on the heels of Glazer as he systematically finds and kills his targets and their families through stakeouts and deceptions. The book succeeds in making the opposing characters of Glazer and Lee into compelling adversaries. While Glazer’s mission is definitely merciless, he is driven by his own deep grief and sense of justice; Lee is simply a man with a moral code who wants to return to his family. Readers will dread the inevitable showdown between the two adversaries. Hansford, Eli, and Bobby make excellent villains in the tale, set against the backdrop of the misery and suffering after the war. The novel doesn’t pull any punches about racism and the cruelty against blacks. The ending is sharp and sudden, somewhat at odds with the slower nature of the rest of the story.
A gripping, brutal tale of revenge and devastation.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-18456-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Leviathan Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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