No car chases, explosions, threats against the detective, movie-star locations, or gourmet meals: just a deeply satisfying...
A final appeal from Death Row reopens a decade-old murder case as the world’s preeminent legal novelist (Personal Injuries, 1999, etc.) proves once again why his grasp of the moral dimensions of legal problems sets the gold standard for the genre.
The cops in Turow’s home turf of Kindle County had no trouble solving the Fourth of July Massacre ten years ago because Romeo Gandolph “confessed to everybody but the Daily Planet,” as his court-appointed appellate attorney Arthur Raven tells his junior associate Pamela Towns. But now, weeks from execution, Rommy’s changed his story. Instead of pleading insanity to the shooting of popular restaurant owner Gus Leonidis and two customers, the acknowledged thief and fence suddenly insists he didn’t do it. And improbable, nearly imperceptible cracks begin to appear in the mountain of evidence that aggressive prosecutor Muriel Wynn and her lover Larry Starczek, the lead detective on the case, amassed against Rommy. The DA’s office, eager to keep their files tidy, never questioned key witnesses, came up with questionable forensics of one of the victims, and overlooked the possibility that Rommy may already have been in custody when the gun went off. This time around, as Arthur realizes, there’s another defendant besides Rommy: Gillian Sullivan, the judge who found him guilty and sentenced him to death before her own conviction and sentence for bribery. Working with Gillian’s unwilling help, Arthur manages to get a confession from a long-unsuspected source. Fans of Turow, however, will see this second confession as no more reliable than the first—except as a device to strip away still more layers of deception from troubled characters desperate to break the fragile alliances they were desperate to form.
No car chases, explosions, threats against the detective, movie-star locations, or gourmet meals: just a deeply satisfying novel about deeply human people who just happen to be victims, schemers, counselors-at-law, or all three at once.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-374-28160-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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