Potshot

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Reporter Jack McMorrow, who left New York's rat race for calmer rural Maine, tangles with plotting rural hippies and vicious urban drug dealers in this timely, colorful adventure his fourth, after Lifeline. At a country-life fair, Jack meets Bobby Mullaney, a vocal advocate of marijuana legalization. Sensing a good freelance story, McMorrow visits the isolated forest home that Bobby shares with his wife, Melanie, her brooding teenage son, Stephen, and an enigmatic, scary friend known as Coyote. Before Jack can write his story, Bobby and Coyote disappear on a trip to meet drug contacts in Massachusetts. Melanie, nervous about cops, calls Jack for help. When he and his resourceful ex-marine buddy, Clair, ask questions, the dealers answer with an assassination attempt. Although local police believe that Bobby has been murdered, Jack rejects their theory. Meanwhile, his lover, social worker Roxanne Masterson, is viciously beaten by child-abusing parents. Jack's romantic dialogue with Roxanne leans too much toward cute repartee, but their relationship strengthens the hero's character. Boyle provides a big cast of quirky down-easters as he authoritatively guides us through the Maine woods. The climactic chase is a stunner. Mar.

Library Journal

In Boyle's fourth offering following Lifeline, Putnam, 1996, the characters are fully realized, and the plot, if a bit contrived, moves along believably enough. Boyle has a wonderful sense of place-in this case, Maine, where Jack McMorrow has fled to escape the workaholic drive that led him to become a top reporter for the New York Times. Now he works as a freelancer, which leads him into places most reporters avoid. McMorrow is enlisted by a group of old hippies to do a story on the legalization of marijuana. What appears to be a worthy cause-and a quick $300 paycheck-quickly escalates into confrontations with violent gangsters. A parallel story involves McMorrow's love interest, Roxanne, a social worker who confronts danger as she attempts to rescue children from abusive parents. Along with snappy dialog that propels the story, Boyle presents an ensemble of likable characters. A sure thing for anyone who has enjoyed Robert Parker's Spenser novels.-Terrill Persky, Woodridge P.L., Ill.

Kirkus Reviews

Fourth in the Jack McMorrow series (Lifeline, 1996, etc.), featuring a freelance reporter-cum-gumshoe who's left the New York Times for more mellow pastures in Prosperity, Maine. Jack and his girlfriend Roxanne are visiting a Country Life Fair when counterculturalist homesteader Bobby Mullaney and his sidekick Coyote ask him to sign a petition to decriminalize marijuana. This prompts Jack to get a feature assignment from the Boston Globe on the legalization-of-marijuana movement in Maine, and to visit Bobby at his home in the deep woods. Out there, Jack also meets Bobby's wife Melanie. Bobby and Coyote take Jack far into the woods and show him some magnificent pot plants that they've grown. Then, as Jack writes his feature, Bobby and Coyote disappear in nearby Florence while making a pot delivery. Jack's search takes him and his ex-marine buddy Clair to Valley, a Massachusetts town Bobby and Melanie had fled ten years before when Bobby was arrested for selling coke, became an informer, and got off with short-time. Now Bobby seemingly has gone back into the lion's den, trying to collect for a pot shipment, and has been caught by the gang he earlier informed on. His burnt white van is discovered with a blackened body in it, and dental records say the body is Bobby's. But Jack smells something fishy and pushes his investigation into unexpected waters. Again and again, as all this goes on, Boyle gives us information we already know, but which Jack has to repeat. And he fearlessly spins out long trails of Nick & Nora sitcom chitchat that lighten things between Jack and Roxanne but leave us spinning our wheels.

A sporadically entertaining tale if you don't expect too much.