Only Killers and Thieves by Paul Howarth What if Cormac McCarthy was Australian and wrote accessible prose? The result might be quite a bit like Paul Howarth’s debut novel. Set largely in the Australian cattlelands of the 1880s, Only Killers and Thieves is a book about good and evil, innocence and experience, white and black, and the near impossibility of maintaining your ideals in a corrupted world. Tommy McBride is the younger son of a cattle rancher. Drought has rendered the family ranch nearly free of vegetation and left the cattle hungry and barely worth selling. The family has been […]
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jeverett15's Reviews:
What a Bastard
The Far Side of the Dollar by Ross Macdonald
Grizzled ex-cop P.I. Lew Archer is called in to the principal’s office when a boarding school student runs away after less than a week in class. But this is no ordinary school. It’s something of a school for wayward boys, and the runaway in question had just apparently stolen his neighbor’s car and wrecked it. Archer sinks his teeth into the case when no one will give him a straight answer, not even the boy’s distraught parents. Ignoring orders to cease his investigation, Archer stumbles across a few leads stretching back twenty years to the end of World War II, […]
7/13/2017 's CBR9 Review No:25 |
The Bare Minimum
The Last Kind Words Saloon by Larry McMurtry
The Last Kind Words Saloon is a testament to how much you can get away with when you’re a famous novelist. The Last Kind Words Saloon purports to be a novel about Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday and the road to their famous shootout in Tombstone, Arizona, but in truth it is barely a novel at all. With 60 short chapters in a novel under 200 pages long there is barely time for any plot to occur. McMurtry tries to dispel some myths of the Old West by depicting Wyatt not as the fabled lawman but as a frequently drunk layabout […]
7/6/2017 's CBR9 Review No:24 |
The Game Within the Game After the Game
Game 7, 1986 by Ron Darling
This is a book for a niche audience. Obviously you’d have to be a baseball fan to even have a passing interest, but on top of that you’d really need to be a Mets fan to care enough to read it. Not only that but you’d probably have to be old enough to remember the 1986 Mets or at least have a specific interest in that historic team. It would also help if you were given the book by your mom. For those of you who don’t know and are still reading this for some reason, Ron Darling was a […]
6/30/2017 's CBR9 Review No:23 |
Murder and Mayhem in Oklahoma
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
Everyone’s history deserves to be told. One of the principal reactions I had to David Grann’s new book, about a series of heinous murders committed against wealthy Osage Indians in the 1920s, was incredulity that I had never heard even an inkling about this terrible chapter in American history. The story, in brief: after being forced out of their original homeland the Osage Indians found themselves on a rocky, arid plain in Oklahoma that was given to them essentially because no one else wanted it. The Osage were smart enough to ensure that the terms of their agreement gave them […]
6/22/2017 's CBR9 Review No:22 |
Murder from the Inside Out
The Ivory Grin by Ross Macdonald
Ross Macdonald’s plots are just as intricate as Raymond Chandler’s, but somehow he manages to tie it all together with no loose ends. (Who did kill that chauffeur anyway?) The only way I can imagine Macdonald putting together his mysteries is by writing a straightforward novel without a detective, then putting all the events in the wrong order for his detective, ex-cop Lew Archer to discover one at a time. All the staples of the Lew Archer series are on display here, the post-war California setting, the miserable rich people, the people desperate for money, the psychological trauma underpinning it […]
6/13/2017 's CBR9 Review No:22 |
The Loneliest Man on the Planet
Mr. Adam by Pat Frank
I’d never heard of this book before stumbling upon it at the Strand last week. Its cover hails it as a lost classic of the atomic age and while the “lost” part seems indisputable, the “classic” descriptor is up for debate. Stephen Decatur Smith narrates his chance happening on perhaps the biggest story of the century, the fact that no new babies are being born. It seems as though a nuclear accident has rendered the male population of the world entirely sterile. Humanity’s future looks hopeless until Steve discovers that a man named Homer Adam has managed to impregnate his […]
6/8/2017 's CBR9 Review No:21 |
Urban Decay
Blue City by Ross Macdonald
The improbably-named Johnny Weather hitchhikes into his unnamed hometown for the first time in years only to find that his father is dead and a stepmother he’s never met has inherited everything. Even worse is that his father’s murder remains unsolved due to a corrupt political machine and a compliant police department. Taking matters into his own fists, Weather brawls and shoots his way to a solution, plunging further and further into the rotten core of the city his father helped begrime. This is another Ross Macdonald novel without his usual protagonist, private eye Lew Archer. Weather, a tough but […]
6/3/2017 's CBR9 Review No:20 |