Often exciting and absorbing with a tough, hard-boiled style, but it could be more imaginative about future society.
An alcoholic detective investigating his ex-wife’s murder overturns evidence of a dangerous conspiracy in this debut noir-flavored sci-fi novel.
In the near future—only those over 65 can remember a world before the internet—three corporations control everything, and the biggest of these giants is Chicago-based Unitex. Nearly everyone wears implanted chips manufactured by the company to access information, entertainment, and communication. A few, like Chicago police detective Jack Waldron, prefer external links; radical group PURE, People United Resisting Enhancements, entirely opposes cybernetics. Ever since his young daughter died, for which he blames himself, and his divorce, Jack has retreated into whiskey and virtual reality replays of his best memories. But when his ex, Rebecca Witherspoon, is brutally raped and killed, Jack is drawn into a series of murder investigations and virtual worlds that at first seem unrelated. Though warned off, Jack keeps probing as the body count rises; he often encounters violence and danger, risking narrow escapes in search of the truth. With a few allies (or are they?), such as Cassandre “Cassie” Charbonneau—a PURE activist—Jack must crawl out of his whiskey bottle and confront both past and present to bring down a conspiracy bent on controlling all of humanity. In his novel, Lange combines the hard-boiled, fisticuffs atmosphere of pulp detective fiction with future-tech gizmos and accompanying paranoia. The near-future setting in roughly the early 2050s is close enough to readers’ own for its presentation of issues regarding surveillance and privacy to grab them. The author’s descriptions of virtual reality games, AI–controlled cars, and similar tech are engaging and well-written. But in ways large and small, the future hasn’t changed enough. An elderly battle-ax in hair curlers; sex workers named “Tiffany, Brandy, Amber”; a man who dislikes that his wife has more money than he does; a lesbian who’s criticized for “pretending to be” a man; a cinematic showdown in a warehouse—too many elements of this tale seem old-fashioned or clichéd today, much less 30-plus years from now.
Often exciting and absorbing with a tough, hard-boiled style, but it could be more imaginative about future society.Pub Date: March 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9994370-0-1
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Pacific Arts Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2018
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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