A tad off the bull’s-eye hit by Larry McMurtry’s Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae adventures but a darn good way to pass an...
Knott (Robert B. Parker's The Bridge, 2014, etc.) continues the inimitable Parker’s Western series with marshals Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch caught up in the aftermath of a Denver policeman’s wife’s murder.
Sgt. Roger Messenger has traced his wife’s alleged killer, Boston Bill Black, down to Appaloosa territory, where Cole and Hitch keep the law. Messenger confronts Boston Bill, who’s busy setting up a new gambling hall, and is killed by one of Bill's henchmen. Bill and two bodyguards flee. Cole and Hitch pursue, but in the chase, popular deputy sheriff Skinny Jack is killed. The marshals bring in the bodyguard who killed Messenger, with the other shot dead. But it’s bounty hunter Valentine Pell who brings Boston Bill back to Appaloosa for trial. Hitch is astounded to learn that Pell is Cole’s long-lost, and disreputable, half brother. More complications soon occur for Cole and Hitch. Westerns need atmosphere as much as story, and Knott has a knack for six-gun verisimilitude, sketching the land and summer heat, the horses and the shopkeepers. Knott’s especially good with the prototypical Old West marshal, Virgil Cole, “perfectly present in the here and now,” every inch stoic lawman: “ ‘Tangled goddam web,’ I said. ‘Is,’ Virgil said.” Other conversational exchanges, however, occasionally include idioms and phrasing seemingly too modern. Knott’s a descriptive writer—he sees a lawyer as “a tall narrow man with thick tangled eyebrows”—and his tale gallops along without confusing readers new to the series. The undercurrent of the unspoken mutual attraction between Hitch and Virgil’s common-law wife, Allie, continues to heat up the narrative, but this time Hitch takes comfort in the arms of the mysterious Daphne Angel, the gambling hall’s bookkeeper.
A tad off the bull’s-eye hit by Larry McMurtry’s Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae adventures but a darn good way to pass an afternoon for Western fans.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98253-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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