The stakes are higher than ever in the latest chapter of this outstandingly entertaining vampire series.
In this fourth book in The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection, Lizzie, Tucker, and the others will have to put aside their differences when an ancient enemy emerges from the shadows.
It’s been a lonely two years for Tucker in Wyoming. He still has his dog, Rex, and his survivalist friend Lenny, but he now has his intellectually disabled brother, Travis, to look out for. And without Lizzie around, Tucker can’t overcome his feelings of hurt and betrayal. Those emotions have haunted him ever since Lizzie abandoned their love and traveled to Russia to become queen of the vampires, owing to her ability to create new bloodsuckers, a power the others have lost. But unknown to Tucker, Lizzie communicates with Travis, who connects with her via the Meta, the otherworldly plane where all vampires’ consciousnesses go during the day. Things haven’t been easy for Lizzie either. Enforcing the Coda, which stipulates that vampires may only kill evil humans, has made Lizzie unpopular in certain circles. Having enemies is “the natural state of existence for vampires,” her adviser Rurik tells her. But in the last few years, an ancient Egyptian death cult, the Canopic Guild, has gathered strength and recruited new members. Led by the charismatic Brother Jed, the Guild has discovered a way to block vampires’ consciousnesses from returning to their bodies at sunset. The implications are chilling, presenting a threat the undead have never faced before, “a slaughter against which we have no defense.” Bullet-riddled and blood-soaked, this installment smartly weaves a narrative between the threads left loose at the end of the last book while sprinting through its action-propelled plot. The writing team of Hays and McFall (Just West of Hell, 2015, etc.) keeps getting better and better. As the tension builds, the estranged lovers will have to work together to protect the ones they love and find a way to prevent the Guild from sacrificing the world in the name of its ancient god. But Tucker is a proud man, and Lizzie still believes her decision to desert him was for the best. At times graphically violent, provocatively sensual, and even existential, this novel maintains the series’ reputation with a thrilling page-turner that will satiate its readers’ desires for compelling action conveyed through a saga of undying love.
The stakes are higher than ever in the latest chapter of this outstandingly entertaining vampire series.Pub Date: June 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9974113-0-0
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Pumpjack Press
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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