Confident and free-spirited redhead, Sydney Jean Lockhart, has shunned the entrapments of marriage and domesticity in order to maintain her independence and pursue her career as a reporter.
Attending the “Neptune Rising” themed Ball on New Year’s Eve, she finds herself evading the unwanted attentions of undesirable suitors, befriended by various socialites, and looking forward to a bird watching date with used car salesman, Sam Buckner.
In the midst of party revelers, champagne and dancing, a murder occurs and Sydney Lockhart is discovered standing over the victim with his blood on her hands.
Pursued by Police Chief Lynol Fogmore, a cigar-chewing bulldog of a man, hungry for a fast arrest and conviction, Sydney finds herself his number one suspect. In a race against time to prove her innocence, she sets out to solve the case and unmask the real murderer.
Kathleen Kaska’s book is a neatly written, fast-paced and entertaining thriller. Her central character, Sydney Lockhart, is a feisty, strong and believable heroine, embroiled in a charmingly nostalgic murder-mystery, reminiscent of the classic Agatha Christie style whodunits that would also transfer successfully to stage and screen.
This powerful sequel to Once Wild has Nick Serranto attending his beloved wife’s funeral under heavy police guard. Two years later, Nick is an emotionally burned-out, chain-smoking, hard-drinking shell of a man, working as an enforcer and hit-man for his vicious older brother, Cal.
The uneasy balance and fragile structure in the top echelons of this crime family are a time-bomb waiting to explode.
This story has a sharp narrative and biting dialogue between the amoral characters. Gangster crime thrillers are thick on the ground, but Carol Gambill’s Breaking Out Series are among the best of the new wave, a compelling study of how crime can become a way of life and the corrosive effect it has on loyalty, even loyalty to family, breeding paranoia.
Being exploited as little more than hired muscle and an exterminator, Nick Serranto leads a shadowy existence of rage, violence, intimidation, self-loathing and regret, evident in his dealings with criminals, corrupt cops and women he uses and discards.
How do you break from a particular way of life if it’s all that you know, especially when the peer pressure comes from your own family?
It’s easy to imagine Nick in his twilight years, much like the embittered character Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino in The Godfather Part 3, as he says: “Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in!”
However, as Nick discovers, no matter how dark the present, the future always holds hope of love and redemption. Life is full of surprises, twists and turns, and our saviors can come from the mostly unlikely places.
The sins of Shaun MacGregor’s youth are far from forgotten when he is released from prison and returns to his home town in Ashland, Pennsylvania. We learn that he went wild in his youth for a reason: rebellion sparked by years of physical abuse. When he wasn’t being bullied by his father, he was being victimized by others. He’s already served eight years for killing his friend, but there are some in the town who still won’t forget – or forgive. Shaun is a marked man from the moment news is out that he’s back in town. When Maria Bellicia literally runs into him, their status couldn’t be more different, poles apart in the eyes of society. However, it’s a case of opposites attracting; they can’t help falling in love with each other. What follows is a steamy mix of guilt, passion, sex, hatred and violence. This is the first book in the Breaking Out series, and it’s a great read that reminded me of classic noir, steamy, pot-boiler thrillers like James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. I liked the setting and the characters. The pace is steady and the tension builds very well. I believed in Shaun’s struggle to find acceptance and redemption, along with Shaun and Maria’s struggle to stay together in the face of adversity. A love story with a hard edge.
Gritty and effective page-turner of a thriller with the serial killer being triggered by a “type”; in this case, the “plain Jane” brunettes of the title. I was hooked from chapter one, as the killer stalks a potential victim through the city at night, and they pass a crowd gathering outside a cinema showing a rerun of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the fans of the movie, dressed in-costume for the event, unaware of the real horror in their midst.
There is an added dynamic with the sub-plot of the romance between criminal profiler and his ex, Nicole, a cop working on the case with him. The characters are well written and the story speeds along nicely with chapters and narrative passages that come as swift and sharp as a punch. This is a nice mix of tough cop thriller, drama, love story, gory scenes of murder, that come together in a hard-hitting, intelligently written story, with a current of dark humor flowing throughout.
This is my second reading of this journal and it’s been a long time since the first. From 1982–84, as I finished up my last two years at school and looked forward to the day when I could get the hell out of there, a copy of this book was a permanent fixture on my English teacher’s desk. When I got through with the assignments, I would borrow it for 10–20 minutes and read some more. My teacher had no problem with me loaning the book for the duration but, much to my chagrin, he wouldn’t let me have the book for keeps. And so I read it in segments and only during quiet spells of his lessons. I don’t blame him for not giving up his copy because I wouldn’t have either, in his place. I saw the movie a year or two earlier and I loved it. I still do. Over the decades, I’ve sat through numerous repeat viewings and it’s lost none of its magic.
Author, Bob Balaban, played David Laughlin, map-maker and interpreter to Francois Truffaut’s character, the scientist and ufologist, Claude Lacombe.
His personal journal takes the reader behind the scenes with an insight into his own reservations about his ability to speak French well enough to fulfill his role. There are some witty observations, with others that are alarming: Melinda Dillon suffered an ankle injury and kept it hidden during numerous retakes – attempting not to hop as she ran up the base of Devil’s Tower, at the same time on consecutive days to maintain the continuity of lighting, the death threats made to Richard Dreyfuss, the extra who was almost torn in half by barbed wire during a stunt involving a car breaking through a fence and racing across a field.
Speaking as a life-long fan of the movie, and an incurable movie buff, this book was a pleasure to read.
It’s also a fun movie to introduce to people who are watching it for the first time. I make the room as dark as possible, turn up the volume, the music rises over the opening credits (white words against a black background), building to a loud crescendo … then comes a blast of sound with the screen simultaneously becoming bright, filling the room with light. I always grin with a joker’s sense of accomplishment as friends jump in their seats. I salute Steven Spielberg for his movie making genius and it makes me sad that I missed seeing this on the big cinema screen. What a way to start the movie!
Also recommended:
The book came my way after I saw the movie, starring Richard Gere. I’m including both versions in this review as I feel the movie’s the better of the two: a sharper and more focused retelling of the accounts leading up to and including the Silver Bridge tragedy on the Ohio River, between Gallipolis, Ohio, and Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 1967.
How much readers believe of the mystery surrounding the Mothman encounters and sightings depends on how open-minded they are.
The book is a catalogue of various sightings and experiences of not only the Mothman, but also a wide variety of paranormal phenomena, including angels, demons, alien visitations, mutilated animals, accounts of UFO sightings, testimonies from witnesses, including several who have been approached by the “Men in Black” – among them the enigmatic and indefinable Indrid Cold. Several witness were afflicted by a strange conjunctivitis, having seen “something” and been exposed to an energy that left them injured. Many of the Mothman witnesses share a mindset in common: what they saw frightened them, they don’t feel privileged to have seen it and they hope they never see it again.
The fact that people witnessed and experienced this phenomenon can’t be repudiated; there are similar accounts from all over the world and at different times throughout history.
The movie is fabulously intense, eerie and atmospheric with excellent performances from all the actors. It’s a mesmerizing story about the blurring of our perception of the natural and supernatural world, where the “sensitive” among us may glimpse things not usually apparent to the majority. One explanation I like is that this phenomenon has been around us all the time and they are a form of natural energy.
In the end, a lot comes down to faith. Many are simply frightened by what they don’t understand, or what doesn’t fit into their view of what constitutes “normality”. It’s easy to be sceptical, particularly when knowledge often comes marred in sound-bites, information overload and disinformation, but we live in a big world, surrounded by a vast, infinite universe.
How much of that is still mystery?
We have a need to know. But maybe it’s as the character Alexander Leek in the movie, played by Alan Bates, points out: we’re not allowed to know!
Many of the movie thrillers I have come to enjoy over the years were directed by Sidney Lumet, who died from lymphoma at his home in Manhattan, New York, on April 9, 2011, aged 86. After serving in World War II, he created his own theatre workshop. Along with theatre and film, he was also successful as a TV director. Coincidentally, his first movie, 12 Angry Men (1957), was the first I saw. When I was kid, I spent many Friday and Saturday nights watching the late movies on TV. The drama in the story, adapted from a play, knocked me out as these 12 angry men argue the case, with 11 of them ready to condemn a man for a crime he’s innocent of. Henry Fonda plays the lone dissenter who eventually convinces them of his innocence.
Never shy to film a controversial story, hard-hitting dramas such as: The Hill (1965), an early role for Sean Connery surviving the tough boot-camp army regime.
Child’s Play (1972), a dark and surreal study of mind-control and savagery in a British boarding school.
The Offence (1972), another dark role for Sean Connery focussing on the effects police work can have on the mind, particularly when dealing with heinous crimes. These themes, along with those of corruption and dysfunctional family relationships became a driving factor.
Serpico (1973), a power-house role for Al Pacino as real-life cop, Frank Serpico, who refuses to buckle to peer-pressure, in a stand against corruption that almost cost him his life.
The Pawnbroker (1964), based on the novel by Edward Lewis Wallant, gave Rod Steiger one of the most powerful roles of his career as a Holocaust survivor haunted by his memories of the concentration camp and the pain of losing his family and wife, played by Geraldine Fitzgerald.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975), another true story with Al Pacino again playing the main role of the homosexual bank robber, bungling a heist in a desperate attempt to fund his partner’s sex change operation.
Similar themes of a heist-gone-wrong and surveillance was explored again in:
The Anderson Tapes (1971), starring Sean Connery as a career criminal, leading his gang to rob an apartment block with disastrous results.
Network (1976), starred Peter Finch, William Holden, Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway in a scathing black comedy satire on the TV media manipulation.
Equus (1977), based on the Peter Schaffer play, starred Richard Burton in one of his best roles, as a middle-aged psychiatrist who questions the meaning and validity of his own life as he tried to unravel the mind of a disturbed patient who blinded six horses.
Other notable dark dramas followed covering similar themes:
Prince of the City (1981), Deathtrap (1982), The Verdict (1982), Q & A (1990), Night Falls on Manhattan (1997), Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007).
Lumet’s early film: Fail-Safe (1964) dealt with the end of the world through nuclear holocaust, triggered by man’s misplaced trust in technology, and was the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s hilarious black comedy: Dr. Strangelove. Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963). It was successfully remade as:Fail Safe (2000), a one-off TV special starring a stellar cast of actors. Among them George Clooney, Harvey Keitel, Richard Dreyfuss and Brian Dennehy.
Very much an independent director, Sidney Lumet’s work was unflinching in its depictions of a dark and volatile world, with individuals caught up in the sprawling cities, at war with bureaucracy and corruption, fighting for justice and truth.
Confident and free-spirited redhead, Sydney Jean Lockhart, has shunned the entrapments of marriage and domesticity in order to maintain her independence and pursue her career as a reporter.
