Sin Killer (The Berrybender Narratives) - Hardcover

McMurtry, Larry

3.66

5,127 ratings by Goodreads

9781587243011: Sin Killer (The Berrybender Narratives)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1587243016 ISBN 13: 9781587243011

Publisher: Wheeler Pub Inc, 2002

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Larry McMurtry's Sin Killer, the first novel of a major four-volume work, is set in the West when it was still unexplored, with a rich, brilliant cast of characters, their lives as intertwined and memorable as those of Lonesome Dove, a work that is at once literature and great entertainment. It is 1830, and the Berrybender family, rich, aristocratic, English, and fiercely out of place, is on its way up the Missouri River to see the American West as it begins to open up. Accompanied by a large and varied collection of retainers, Lord and Lady Berrybender have abandoned their palatial home in England to explore the frontier and to broaden the horizons of their children, who include Tasmin, a budding young woman of grit, beauty, and determination, her vivacious and difficult sister, and her brother. As they journey by rough stages up the Missouri River, they meet with all the dangers, difficulties, temptations, and awesome natural scenery of the untamed West, as well as a cast of characters including Indians, pioneers, mountain men, and explorers, both historical and imaginary, and with as many adventures as Gus and Call faced in Lonesome Dove. At the very core of the book is Tasmin's fast-developing relationship with Jim Snow, frontiersman, ferocious Indian fighter, and part-time preacher (known up and down the Missouri as the Sin Killer), the strong, handsome, silent Westerner who eventually captures her heart, despite the fact that they are two intensely strong-willed people, from very different backgrounds. Against the immense backdrop of the American West, still almost (but not quite) unspoiled, Larry McMurtry has created a wonderfully engaging familyconfronting every bigger-than-life personality of the frontier, from the painter George Catlin to Indian chiefs, beaver trappers, mountain men, and European aristocrats and adventurers, as they make their way up the great river, surviving attacks, discomfort, savage weather, and natural disaster. Sin Killer is a great adventure story full of incident, suspense, and excitement, from a buffalo stampede to an Indian raid, coupled with a charmingly unlikely love story between a headstrong and aristocratic young Englishwoman and a stubborn, shy, and very American product of the West, in the person of Jim Snow. At once epic, comic, and as big as the West itself, it is the kind of novel that only Larry McMurtry can write.

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Review:

"Irresistible...full of blood, blunder and myth."

-- "The New York Times"

"The Washington Post" A sprawling parody of the frontier encounter...."Sin Killer" is a zany, episodic ride. With gusto and nonstop ingenuity, McMurtry moves his cast of characters and caricatures steadily upstream.

"The New York Times" Irresistible.

" Chicago Tribune" A story as big as the West itself.

""Sin Killer" offers a zany, episodic ride...It is a journey made of pratfalls, floggings, stabbings, bawdy seductions, gruesome deaths and daring rescues."
--"The Washington Post"

"In this tale of the exploration, and exploitation, of the West, McMurtry is telling us something about our checkered past -- and perhaps about our uncertain present."
-- People

"Irresistible...full of blood, blunder and myth."
-- The New York Times

"Sin Killer offers a zany, episodic ride...It is a journey made of pratfalls, floggings, stabbings, bawdy seductions, gruesome deaths and daring rescues."
--The Washington Post

About the Author:

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove, three memoirs, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. He lives in Archer City, Texas.

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