RAIN FALLS LIKE MERCY
Todd, Jack Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (272 pp.) $25.00 | Nov. 8, 2011 978-1-4165-9851-0 This Western-based tale of murder, war, love and the pursuit of justice cuts a wide swath from Japan to Germany before returning home to Wyoming and leaving readers breathless. In 1941, Sheriff Tom Call investigates the vicious killing of a 15-year-old runaway girl whose body is found in a shack on Eli Paint’s ranch. Call is dedicated and conscientious, but he finds time to enjoy flying his single-engine Aeronca and taking Paint’s wife for rides that lead to their love affair. The murder case occupies and frustrates him right up until the attack on Pearl Harbor, when he decides to put his passion for flying to use as a B-17 pilot in Europe. Todd’s writing is exceptional and vivid, especially in depicting the combat scenes on the USS Tennessee in the Pacific. The large cast of characters fights the war on two oceans. Amid the dangers of combat, Call’s mind often returns to the murder. Meanwhile, Pardo Bury, the son of a powerful businessman and a seriously unbalanced lowlife, does hard time in a Texas prison for slicing a prostitute. He is released around the time the war ends and is bent on revenge, embarking on a crime spree best not read about over lunch. Pardo doesn’t especially need revenge as a motivation, though. In the tradition of criminals like Charles Starkweather, he takes a special pleasure in killing for its own sake. When the story follows Pardo after the war, the sex and violence are as graphic as they can be, rather like being crushed to a puddle by a pallet of Penthouse magazines. The final showdown between good and evil hits the reader like a knife to the gut. A brilliant, compelling, at times repulsive and highly readable novel.
FOOTBALL WIDOWS
Tucker, Pat Atria Books (304 pp.) $15.00 paperback | Oct. 4, 2011 978-1-59309-315-0 Hell hath no fury like a scorned woman who finds out that all her friends knew her shame. B.J. Almond is used to being the queen bee. The wife of an NFL head coach, she has adopted his top status in the wives’ hierarchy, lording her no-nonsense attitude and slightly conservative personal style over her coterie of assistant coaches’ wives. Not that her designer duds aren’t as costly or her pleasures any less extravagant, but neither her necklines nor her morals have plunged quite so much as her juniors’ have in order to keep their marriages together. Small wonder then, that when B.J. walks in on her husband fooling around with one of their own, she’s 1872
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furious—and when she realizes that all her so-called friends knew, she’s madder still. Her planned revenge includes a tell-all book, in which she threatens to use all the knowledge she has gathered as the take-charge go-to gal of their clique, dirt her agent promises will make her book a bestseller. As she holes up in the Ritz, supposedly writing, she recalls them all—the time she had to rescue one friend who was left nude and dazed in a no-tell motel, the trip she took so another could get anonymous treatment for an STD— in lurid detail. In between her racy rememberings, the other gals scurry to salvage their lives of immense privilege and, occasionally, love. The fallout gets worse when one woman threatens to write her own book and another turns violent. But the real passion in this African-American-targeted fantasy by Tucker (Daddy by Default, 2010, etc.) is for the Jimmy Choos and other expensive paraphernalia that these women accept as their due. While the sex scenes are written with titillation in mind (all bodies are hard, all passion peaks), it’s the fashion that really excites these women and, most likely, the readers who choose to give them their time. Payback may be dirty, nasty and mean, but all dressed up, it provides a guilty pleasure for the reader.
QUEEN OF AMERICA
Urrea, Luis Alberto Little, Brown (384 pp.) $25.99 | Dec. 7, 2011 978-0-316-15486-4
In his sequel to The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005), Urrea continues the mythic history of his great aunt Teresita as she begins a new life in the United States after escaping her political and religious enemies in Mexico in 1893. While a young girl in Mexico, Teresita, called the Saint of Cabora, has developed a wide following of believers in the healing power of her touch, although she insists that God does the healing and she is merely a conduit. The Mexican government believes she also foments rebellion, the reason 19-year-old Teresita and her father Tomás Urrea flee to Arizona, where her father’s best friend, a politically active newspaperman, uses her popularity to rally public sentiment against the corrupt Mexican president. Violence as well as goodness seems to follow in her wake, yet all Teresita wants is to practice her healing. She is a fascinating mix of wisdom, love of life’s simple pleasures (like ice cream) and innocence, but is she a saint? As she and alcoholic, profane Tomás—a landowner who impregnated Teresita’s Indian mother—settle into Arizona society, Mexico sends agents to kill her. They all end up dead. But a more insidious evil eventually arrives in 1899: cruel but handsome Rodriguez, who marries her, them immediately tries to kill her; worse, he destroys her relationship with Tomás and her local reputation. She has no choice but to leave Arizona. In California a consortium of questionable businessmen sets her up as a healer under a devious contract that keeps her a virtual prisoner until the lovable rogue John Van Order, a friend from her earliest Arizona days, arrives and negotiates a better deal. As her fame and
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