Counting Coup: A Novel - Hardcover

Gearino, G. D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684837269 ISBN 13: 9780684837260

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1997

Synopsis

A jaded newspaper columnist is jolted back to reality when a reader who had called him for help turns up dead two days later, and during his efforts to find out why, he begins to feel that he has been given a second chance at life

About this title

Reviews

A second helping from North Carolina writer Gearino (What the Deaf-Mute Heard, 1995), whose style seems to be evolving from southern gothic to southern maudlin. Journalists have been known as tough guys at least since Julius Caesar's first stint as a war correspondent, but somehow Tad Beckman doesn't seem to fit the mold. Sardonic and knowing enough in his down-home, corn-pone style, Tad writes a column three times a week for the Barrington Chronicle, a small-town Georgia daily. Only child Tad's Yankee father was killed in WW II while Tad was still in his mother's womb, and the boy grew up trapped in the narrow space between his grandfather's redneck cruelty and his mother's manic despair. An outsider and a drifter, Tad falls into journalism after college and quickly discovers a talent for it, especially when he goes beyond the simple mechanics of reporting and becomes the advocate of some lost cause or character. ``A few times in my life, I've been able to fix something. . . . As a result, people think I have magical powers: They believe I can change things by writing about them.'' Unfortunately, even Tad himself seems to think so after a fashion, until he's brought up short by the sorts of realities he'd always believed himself well- prepared for. First, a woman who had turned to him for help is brutally murdered after he dismisses her story as small change. Then he becomes embroiled in an elaborate investigation of a shady real-estate developer whose affairs turn out to be lethal. The cloak-and-dagger atmosphere he's drawn into eventually proves Tad's undoing as a journalist. He settles down, in the end, only after he's discovered the truth of the mystery that haunts him: that of his family and himself. Gripping and taut for much of the way, but toward the close Gearino loses his focus and ends up rambling. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Newspaper columnist Tad Beckman has grown weary of listening to the pathetic complaints of the oppressed. So when a desperate woman contacts him about her abusive husband, he can't work up much sympathy, labeling the incident "an ordinary white-trash drama." A week later, the woman's husband decapitates her in front of their three small children; Beckman writes a self-flagellating column that nets him a Pulitzer and then promptly quits the newspaper. After a year of aimlessness, he takes up his trade with renewed vigor only to be duped by a lover into writing a libelous column. His quest to find out why his lover set him up brings him face to face with some unpleasant truths about his own family. Gearino's (What the Deaf-Mute Heard, 1996) tightly written morality tale suffers from a contrived plot that wraps things up way too neatly, yet his intimate knowledge of the newsroom and his assured prose style will hook readers right from the outset. Joanne Wilkinson

Tad Beckman makes his living "arranging the words this way and that" as a columnist for the Barrington (Georgia) Chronicle. Tad had started out with an almost religious eagerness to testify on the human condition. Lately, however, he's become jaded at the predictability of human nature. So when a woman calls from the trailer park with a tale of victimization?her abusive ex-husband is threatening and the police won't protect her?Tad impatiently yells at her to pack up the kids and leave town. Whether or not she understands him, she is dead within days, murdered by her ex, who then chops off her head in front of their children. This hideous event sets in motion a compelling tale of revenge, intrigue, and redemption as we follow Tad in his quest for a second chance. Gearino (What the Deaf Mute Heard, S. & S., 1996) has a cynical humor and an eye for the authentic as he teases the reader along with bits of the puzzle and hints of more to come. If, ultimately, the pieces fit a little too neatly, the game is still an enjoyable pastime. Recommended.?Kay Hogan, Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684837269
• ISBN 13: 9780684837260
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224