Rating: 
Summary: The OLd west
Review: McMurtry's latest effort is no "Lonesome Dove" but it was a highly readable. I love his prose , and sense of place. This is Tetralogy. it will take some time to build. Enjoy- I did.
Rating: 
Summary: AN AUTHORITATIVE READING OF AN EPIC TALE
Review: Returning to the setting he captured so memorably in "Lonesome Dove," Pulitzer Prize winner Larry McMurtry again focuses on the untamed American West. Noted stage/screen actor Alfred Molina gives a vividly authoritative reading to "Sin Killer," an epic tale of an aristocratic English family who journey up the Missouri River to see our country's 1830s frontier. Planning to hunt Lord Albany Berrybender boards a river boat accompanied by assorted Berrybenders and a retinue of servants. Family members include his wife who is ill prepared for the brutalities of this wilderness, and children Bobbety, Buffum, Mary and Tasmin. Without a doubt, Tasmin is independent and brave, doing more than her share throughout the trip and overseeing all. That is until she meets one who needs no overseeing - Jim Snow. Called Sin Killer, Snow is a good looking, irascible maverick. He's a religious zealot who divides his time between preaching and battling Indians. Tasmin and Snow fall in love. Few need to be reminded of the brilliance of McMurtry's storytelling or his remarkable prose, stunning in its clarity. The first in an announced tetralogy, Sin Killer is as awesome as was our frontier and totally captivating. - Gail Cooke
Rating:
Summary: Immensely Satisfying Tale
Review: Once again, Larry McMurtry has created a complex world of eccentric characters in the Old West. Since I consider "Lonesome Dove" a contender for "The Great American Novel," I was delighted that McMurtry is once more writing Western novels. The Berrybender family with its independent named and numbered offspring, self-indulgent parents and haphazard entourage contrasts starkly with the Americans, Indians and Canadians but there are no saints here. Neither trite nor predictable, the main story line is frequently put on hold as the action follows characters to their fate or doom. My only complaint is that book one ended too soon and I don't want to wait for a year for the next installment!!
Rating: 
Summary: Really Bad Writing
Review: This novel is a real dissappointment, especially from an award-winning author. The characters are not only uniformly unlovable, but also two dimensional characteratures. The story is not helped by a series of major historical bloopers in the first chapters - one in which a little boy wishes that his big sister could be bitten by a mosquito so "she could die of malaria." This in the 1830's decades before anyone had any idea of the connection. Later the author,in two places, has the aristocratic lord valuing his daughters only for the large doweries they would bring in. It doesn't take a student of English history to know that dowery refers to the amount of property required to marry a girl off, and that a young English girl's matrimonial prospects rose and fell on the amount she could bring with her. Perhaps McMurty is confusing this with the Arab world and "bride price." In short bad writing, worse editing, a dull story. If you have to read it at least wait for the paperback.
Rating:
Summary: Sin Killer is truly McMurtry Fan Killer
Review: One has the feeling that McMurtry was either drunk when he wrote this farce or it's his way of showing contempt for Lonesome Dove fans and his own earlier work while confirming his suspicion that he can set absolutely anything to paper and generate a best seller or a trilogy of them. This is a grotesque work of comedy and low comedy at that. The premise, a steamboat full of aristocratic lunatics from England touring the frontier in 1832, is patently absurd; but, as I said, this is a comedic farce, it should have been set to music as an operetta. A steamboat full of nouveau riche Texans would have been more like it. McMurtry still has a good eye and ear for perilous and interesting fixes to put his characters in (as long as it involves extremely cold weather) but the characters are buffoons, the "fixes" so heavily contrived and unlikely that one immediately thinks of Laurel and Hardy and the "fixes" themselves are merely pratfalls and are not to be taken seriously. Sin Killer is a terrible book. Had it been penned by an unknown, no publisher on earth would have touched it. It is a major disappointment for fans of Gus and Call. The inverted prose style, no doubt meant to heighten the comedic sense merely suggests a drunk with a lampshade on his head at a party. McMurtry just ended the thing somewhere around page 150 when his computer crashed or he had something burning on the stove or maybe some sort of deadline loomed. There wasn't even time to select chapter titles, so apparently someone on his staff decided that randomly selected sentence fragments from the text would serve. This book is a real downer to fans of the Lonsome Dove series. McMurtry has betrayed his audience. Vote with your pocketbook.
Rating:
Summary: A false and degraded West
Review: Mr. McMurtry continues his agenda of prostituting and degrading this great land's history. In his early days, he restricted himself to debasing small West Texas towns. But he is a prolific writer and over the years has falsely painted his own ugliness across most of this country's past, from the Rio Bravo to the Canadas and from the Missouri to the Rockies. He mines true history and uses small truths to beguile the city reader with a false view of our heritage. This book seems merely an attempt to degrade the story of the Missouri River. If you love your past and the truth about it, this book will not speak to your heart.
Rating: 
Summary: Easy read
Review: I see several bad reviews on this book. I have to admit that it is not Lonesome Dove, but it is an enjoyable easy read. A nice change of pace. Three books are in the coming, maybe subsequent volumes will change some minds about this tetrology.
Rating:
Summary: The Start of a Great Adventure
Review: This is a good book, but don't expect "Lonesome Dove." There will probably never be another "Lonesome Dove," not by McMurty or anyone else. The feel of the early American West is on every page of this book. The almost casual cruelty of a natural wilderness and the people who manage to survive in that wilderness is on display in McMurty's descriptions of the West. The story moves quickly, sometimes too quickly: Now and then, the various plot lines don't seem to be in sync with each other. But, apparently, this is the "set up" book for the next three tales about these same people. As some reviewers have complained, many of the characters are shallow, but most of them are supposed to be shallow. The Berrybenders are a rich, arrogant clan who expected this "new place" to bow before them, and they don't quite realize that they are the ones, in this wild environment, who are the "lower class", the people at the bottom of the food chain. Mcmurty tries too hard for humor in this book, but he still tells a heck of a good story. With the three books to follow, that story will only get better.
Rating:
Summary: Where are ye Augustus?
Review: After writing the outstanding Lonesome Dove, it is understandable that McMurtry has a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, Sin Killer misses by a very long mile. The story revolves around a wealthy English family that has hired a steamer to steam up the Missouri River simply so the bombastic, sex addicted father can hunt. McMurtry surrounds the family with a host of eclectic characters, all of which seem to be having sex with each other. The Sin Killer is a young man raised by the Indians and given back to the whites, in this case a hypocritcal bible thumper. The Sin Killer, thus, tries to kill "sin" in everyone. You, know, I don't even want to go on because this book was so lacking in plot, character development, and so full of characters I couldn't give a damn for. I am a big McMurtry fan and I am sorely disappointed with this effort.
Rating:
Summary: Vastly disappointed !
Review: Just finished reading SIN KILLER by McMurtry. I have always enjoyed read his books but was greatly disappointed in his latest endeavor. There seems little if any plot or story line and his attempts at farce fall far short in my mind. If this is an example of the first book of his tetralogy, you can definitely count me out as far as reading any further volumes in this series. The characters in the book don't a semblance of establishing any personality---they are shallow, predictable, and without any substance in my opinion. I'm disappointed in McMurtry and wonder if he is trying to make it on his name and past writings with this current series.
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