Hruska has settled into the legal-thriller milieu somewhere between the more erudite and complex Turow and the topical,...
In Hruska's latest legal thriller (Wrong Man Running, 2011), set mainly in Manhattan in 1961, only one thing stands in the way of Alec Brno’s chance of partnership at the big-time Wall Street law firm Kendall, Blake, Steele & Braddock.
It’s Carrie Madigan, a drug-addicted mobster’s wife. Alec is smitten, feeling that she’s "burrowing into him as if she were the missing part of his cells," a passion Hruska props up with pop psychology. The two met when Alec's managing partner, Frank Macalister, went on a bender and left him in the hot seat as first chair in a trial centering on the machinations of Carrie’s husband, mob boss Phil Anwar, who keeps her under control with brutal beatings and ample drugs. Anwar’s behind a disappearing diesel scam victimizing United States Safety Vault & Maritime Company. Hruska relies on acceptable typecasting in his short, cinematic chapters: A crusty old judge serves as a senior partner; Alec’s father is a disgraced but honest one-time union employee; and there's an ambitious, Rudy Giuliani–like federal prosecutor. There’s a second, less interesting plot thread involving (think Rupert Murdoch) Jocko Rush’s Telemarch News media empire. The plot rockets along, with Alec yanking the right legal tactic out of his briefcase at the right moment. Alec gets Carrie into rehab and away from Anwar; finds a bolt-hole in Reefer’s Harbor, Maine, where he rigs a trap made of swordfish skeletons and phosphorescent paint; and deals with Darcy, his former lover, who says, "You’re in a bad hole, Alec. You damn well ought to be climbing out of it." Courtroom scenes are brief but key, anachronisms are few, and most actions scenes are better than the one involving glow-in-the-dark fish bones.
Hruska has settled into the legal-thriller milieu somewhere between the more erudite and complex Turow and the topical, quick-moving Grisham.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-938849-40-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Prospect Park Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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 2026 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.
