A brisk tale with a surprisingly sympathetic protagonist who should be able to sustain another winning series.
Bernhardt (Justice Returns, 2017, etc.), known for his long-running Washington, D.C.–set Ben Kincaid courtroom-drama series, returns with a new attorney in a different city.
Lawyer Daniel Pike has always done things his own way, and that’s made him one of the top criminal defense attorneys in St. Petersburg, Florida. But when Daniel’s violent client Emilio Lòpez, whom he’d just saved from conviction, gets involved in a deadly shootout, the lawyer’s white-collar firm fires him. This leaves the arrogant attorney adrift, but then he meets an attractive woman named Maria Morales in a bar, and she invites him to a mysterious meeting. At that gathering, the shadowy “Mr. K” asks Daniel to join the Last-Chance Law Firm. His new associates include strategist Maria, researcher Garrett Wainwright, and facilitator Jimmy Armstrong. Daniel’s first case involves arranging the adoption of Esperanza Coto, a 9-year-old orphan who’s about to be deported to El Salvador. But this is complicated by the fact that Esperanza’s guardian, Gabriella Valdéz, has been charged with murder in the aforementioned shootout. As Daniel investigates the case, he learns that the woman is enmeshed in a much larger conspiracy. He’s going to need to solve this puzzle quickly to save Gabriella and Esperanza from grim fates. This novel is, first and foremost, about Daniel’s moral evolution. In the beginning, the self-centered attorney has no qualms about representing a “walking waste product” like Emilio; he even turns away a woman seeking help for her abused sister (”Too messy. Not profitable”). But as he takes up the cause of Esperanza and Gabriella, he comes to realize that the downtrodden have more urgent need of his services. Also, Bernhardt shows how Daniel was previously a lone wolf who felt that he didn’t have to answer to anyone, but, thanks to his Last-Chance Law Firm partners, he comes to appreciate the value of teamwork. Overall, the author’s narrative maintains a fast pace as Daniel discovers possible suspects before it reveals the unlikely killer.
A brisk tale with a surprisingly sympathetic protagonist who should be able to sustain another winning series.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948263-36-8
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Babylon Books
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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