It’s the tallest of tall tales, of course, but it’s got robust drive, and Lashner (Veritas, 1997, etc.) deserves a tip of...
Victor Carl, Philly defense lawyer, sidles back onstage in Lashner’s latest legal melodrama.
It seems like an open-and-shut case. Here’s lawyer Guy Forrest, sitting outside his house in the Philly suburbs, naked, in the rain, his gun beside him; upstairs on the mattress lies his lover/fiancée, Hailey Prouix, dead by gunshot. A crime of passion, surely? That’s what Victor thinks, discounting Guy’s denials, and Victor should know: not only is he Guy’s close friend (they were at law school together), but he himself had been sleeping with Hailey, a femme fatale who had both men bewitched. Indeed, Guy had left his wife and family to live with her. When Guy is arrested, Victor represents him, vowing to himself to put him away. But the discovery that Guy and Hailey’s joint account has been cleaned out complicates matters. The key is a medical malpractice suit with Hailey and Guy on opposite sides: Hailey had seduced Guy in order to win massive damages for her client, and Guy’s naïveté convinces Victor that his old friend is innocent. Now the hunt is on for the real killer, and the long winding trail takes Victor to a nursing home outside Las Vegas, and then to the West Virginia town where Hailey was raised (and her high school sweetheart possibly murdered). Along the way, before the eventual courtroom theatrics, we’ll learn the Dark Secret that crippled Hailey and sent her twin sister into an asylum, a secret shamelessly embellished by Lashner’s use of Stephen Hawking and Sylvia Plath as props. Other trademark over-the-top flourishes include a knife-wielding lesbian in a dark alley and a hit man who has torn his skin to tatters in self-loathing.
It’s the tallest of tall tales, of course, but it’s got robust drive, and Lashner (Veritas, 1997, etc.) deserves a tip of the hat for Guy’s Houdini-like escape from that opening set-up.Pub Date: May 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-050816-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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
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
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