An edgy mix of wit, chills, and legal wrangling.
An offbeat legal thriller in which attorney Johnny Ocean becomes the target of a psychopathic killer.
Johnny Ocean, Upper East Side legal eagle and owner of a private investigation company, takes on a case handed to him by a colleague who presents it as a simple deposition assignment in a whopping $170,000,000 lawsuit between two sisters-in-law. In 1985, Babette Longwood, wealthy widow of the equally rich and powerful Edgar Longwood, either gave or loaned her brother Marcel Markham $170,000,000. Now it’s the late 1990s, and Marcel has died, leaving his entire estate to his widow, Pandora Markham. Babette wants her money. Pandora says the money was a gift to her husband and now belongs to her. Johnny will be representing the elusive Pandora. Within less than 48 hours, having not yet even spoken with his new client, Johnny receives some explicit threats of bodily harm from a man identifying himself as Bill Rogers. Then a sexually provocative videotape of Pandora is left outside his door, a package of documents from the client is delivered to him, and he’s shot in the shoulder by a gun-wielding home intruder. Other attorneys might give up—but not Golub’s gullibly captivated hero. Fortunately, Johnny’s obsessively loyal Sikh butler, Mr. K (doubling as an investigator), calls upon his sword-carrying Sikh community to provide protection for his employer. Golub’s complicated narrative plumbs the seedy underbelly of New York’s upper class as well as the corruption permeating the Surrogate’s Court. The author’s decades of experience as a celebrity civil litigator are reflected in his intricate courtroom scenes, which seem authentic despite an unlikely number of ex parte (that is, when not all parties are present in court) interactions between the judge and opposing counsel. The story also has a Chinese connection that begins back when Chiang Kai-shek was president of Taiwan; this adds a layer of intriguing history to the murder mystery/legal drama. The novel’s brisk pace slows only during the unnecessarily prolonged passages detailing Johnny’s erotic fantasies about Pandora. A mind-bending final twist will leave readers chuckling.
An edgy mix of wit, chills, and legal wrangling.Pub Date: April 20, 2022
ISBN: 9798806218798
Page Count: 379
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
