A little dark to be a comic caper, but with an original plot and Texas-true characterizations, it’s a top-notch mystery.
In his modern Texas whodunit, Blakely melds a Las Vegas Mafioso tale into the Austin music scene.
It’s 1975, and Creed Mason has come back to Texas just as alt-country is taking off. Creed’s a Vietnam vet with a Purple Heart; he’s bitter because his one-time singing partner, Dixie Houston, parlayed his talent into her own fame after he was drafted. Blakely’s Texas tale widens its trail to follow Austin-bound Rosabella Martini, who's running from her Vegas wiseguy uncle Paulo. Rosabella was adopted, and so there was no blood loyalty in play after she stumbled on her cousin Franco cleaning up a mob hit. Franco's trailed her to Texas and made her his next victim. Next enters Luster Burnett, a legendary but long-retired country musician with a "tone as smooth as an aged whiskey." Luster’s manager shot himself, leaving the singer with gambling markers—some held by Paulo Martini—an IRS lien and the need to get out on the road to sell some records. Creed meets Luster at a poker game and ends up as his band leader, which gives the author, a professional musician, a chance to display his chops writing about the bus-riding, beer-drinking, honky-tonk life of a work-a-day guitar player, right down to the barroom gigs where fights spread "like ripples from a rock tossed into the corner of a pool of nitroglycerin." Blakely’s grip on 1970s social transitions shines as well as he describes a land where folks were still trying to work out who's "colored" and who can be called "boy" as he brings in African-American FBI Special Agent Mel Doolittle, on Paulo's case in Vegas, to partner with Texas Ranger Hooley Johnson, who's investigating Rosabella's murder. Toss in fishing, floating poker games, a précis on songwriting and a fiddler with a propensity for puking, and Blakely brings it all together with a Las Vegas shootout and an unanticipated payoff.
A little dark to be a comic caper, but with an original plot and Texas-true characterizations, it’s a top-notch mystery.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2751-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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
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
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