An extremely well-executed courtroom novel, with a hero readers will want to meet again.
A fast-paced legal thriller turning on questions of sex, self-defense and murder.
At the beginning of Lewis’ lean, debut novel, trial lawyer Will Lively has just won a major court case for his employers at Austin-based Billings & Banks—a case with a multimillion-dollar payday, if the client ever agrees to settle in order to avoid a court verdict. The 30-something hotshot lawyer celebrates the victory, confident that it will prompt the firm’s executives to make him a shareholder. When his slimy boss, Dexter Billings, breaks the news that his promotion has been deferred yet again, Will is bitter. He questions the decision, especially after he’s spent the last five years working 60 hours a week, 51 weeks a year. With the help of his mentor, Buddy Cruz, and the firm’s office manager, Cindy Ellis (with whom he has an impromptu fling on his office couch shortly after he gets the bad news), Will learns that his big case is indeed paying out—and that the firm’s shareholders decided to delay promoting him so that their individual shares of the profit would be that much higher. Will confronts Dexter about this underhanded bad faith. Dexter counters by revealing that he tape-recorded Will and Cindy’s lovemaking, and the two men come to blows in Dexter’s office. When Dexter dives for the .44 Magnum he keeps in his desk, events turn deadly: Will ends up killing Dexter and standing trial himself, with the aid of the legendary defense attorney Justin Jackson (who bills at $1,800 an hour, paid by a mysterious benefactor). Lewis keeps all these complications moving at a satisfying clip, reflecting everything through Will’s approachable viewpoint. While the writing sometimes becomes clichéd (“one fell swoop,” for instance, or “rules were made to be broken”), the book’s final third, set during Will’s trial, is grippingly written, full of sharp dialogue, insider insights into the court system, and twists and well-placed revelations the reader won’t expect.
An extremely well-executed courtroom novel, with a hero readers will want to meet again.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 377
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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