More shifting allegiances, moral dilemmas and characters capable of change than Virgil and Everett’s fans may be used to....
Now that they’ve cleaned up Appaloosa, Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch have to contend with its new police chief in their fourth and presumably final adventure.
All white men are blue-eyed devils, but Amos Callico is more infernal than most. No sooner has he settled in as Appaloosa’s new chief of police, his authority bolstered by a retinue of 12 officers, than he begins to extort protection money from Lamar Speck, who owns the Boston House saloon, and Buford Posner, of the Golden Palace. Callico, who has his eyes set on the governor’s mansion and then on the White House, wastes no time in attempting to neuter the opposition by offering jobs to Virgil and Everett, now living a frontier version of domestic life with Allie French, the lover Virgil rescued in Brimstone (2009), and the traumatized former Indian captive Laurel, who won’t speak to anyone but Virgil. Naturally, the two gunslingers turn Callico down and promptly sign on as bouncers at the Boston House. The stage is clearly set for a climactic confrontation between the corrupt police chief and his minions and the unsullied heroes. Before that can happen, though, Virgil’s half-breed friend Pony Flores comes to town with his brother Kha-to-nay in tow. Pony has helped Kha-to-nay escape from prison, and trouble is sure to follow the pair. Despite the arrival of Pinkerton agent Dell Garrison, however, that trouble doesn’t take the form most readers will expect. Instead, Kha-ton-nay will ally himself with a party of wily Apache braves, and retired Confederate General Horatio Laird, whose no-account son Nicholas Laird killed in the early going, and his hired gunman Chauncey Teagarden will assume central roles. Rest assured that Virgil will get more opportunities to live up to his assertion, “Killing don’t bother me…Long as I follow the rules.”
More shifting allegiances, moral dilemmas and characters capable of change than Virgil and Everett’s fans may be used to. It’s a shame that this youngest of the late Parker’s franchises has to end so soon.Pub Date: May 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-15648-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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