An entertaining frontier shoot-em-up mixing rollicking action with bleak philosophizing.
A United States cavalry officer squares off against a bandit warlord in RLK’s rousing Old West adventure.
In 1880, Civil War veteran Maj. Travis Butler finds his impending retirement postponed when the one-eyed, half-Apache marauder Black Patch (motto: “Know enemy first, then kill all”) erupts from Mexico into the New Mexico Territory with his gang of 100 cutthroats, hellbent on murdering every settler he comes across. Butler pursues Black Patch with a company of the Second Cavalry regiment, helped by his longtime assistant Sgt. Noah Stubborn, the valiant but distrustful Navajo tracker Snow Bear, and one Junior Horner, the epitome of drunken Western grunge (“Bath?...It ain’t even spring yet”) who, when sober, proves to be a brilliant scout and logistics manager—and a dead shot with his Sharp Rifle. Black Patch’s trail of butchered homesteaders leads to a pitched battle at Quarter Moon Pass, then back into Mexico to Black Patch’s lair and a confrontation with 3,000 Mexican soldiers, then up north again for more perils on the road to Oklahoma. RLK’s yarn is a gritty, energetic chase narrative in which success hinges on the careful management of supplies, horses, and water rations—Travis decrees that each man can drink just one canteen every three days—as well as clever strategizing over where the enemy is headed or likely to be lying in ambush. It’s set in a tense frontier society seething with suspicion between Anglos, Indigenous Americans, and Mexicans, even when they’re fighting on the same side. RLK’s prose is vigorous and punchy, whether depicting combat scenes (“Those dead or dying were consumed by the flames; bullets from their belts began exploding causing even more chaos”) or Horner’s hard-bitten lyricism (“lately my mind’s been playing tricks with me, be sitting around thinking about the old days and after a while wonder if it really happened or was it just a dream”). The result is a vivid, bracing read.
An entertaining frontier shoot-em-up mixing rollicking action with bleak philosophizing.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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