by Lisa Scottoline ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 27, 2015
As so often for the firm of Rosato & DiNunzio (Betrayed, 2014, etc.), the ending, logical but woefully underprepared, is...
Twelve years after a Kids-for-Cash scheme ends the childhood of two boys, Philadelphia lawyer Bennie Rosato must defend one of them on a charge of murdering the other.
It’s nothing but a childhood fight, really, but the judge throws the book at both Jason Lefkavick, who draws 90 days in a juvie prison, and Richie Grusini, who gets off with 60 days because his uncle, Declan Mitchell, was a state trooper. Bennie, responding to the pleas of Jason’s father, Matthew, hikes out to Mountaintop, Pennsylvania, in hopes of springing Jason, who hasn’t been properly advised of his right to counsel. In the course of her investigation, the famously abstemious Bennie falls for Declan, and their liaison gets her fired just as her legal wrangling would have borne fruit—and saved scores of other young victims whose families won’t find out till years afterward that the judge has a financial interest in the prison he’s kept stocked to the brim. Fast-forward to the present, when Jason’s been found clasping a bloody knife a few feet away from Richie, whose throat has been slit in an alley minutes after the old enemies had a well-witnessed fight in a Philadelphia bar. Bennie, who’s felt all this time that her fling with Declan ended up tossing Jason to the wolves, is convinced that she has to defend him, even though he refuses to get on board with the self-defense strategy she methodically pursues as her cross-examination picks holes in the testimony of one witness after another. And then, as things seem to be looking up for Jason, a bombshell makes them look much worse for Bennie.
As so often for the firm of Rosato & DiNunzio (Betrayed, 2014, etc.), the ending, logical but woefully underprepared, is a serious disappointment. Fans eager to see Bennie’s courtroom mettle won’t care a bit.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-02793-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Kathy Reichs
by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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