A well-told true-crime tale mixed with expert political/historical analysis.
New York Times London bureau chief Cowell (A Walking Guide, 2003, etc.) investigates the murder of KGB agent turned defector Alexander Litvinenko.
The George Polk Award–winning journalist’s doggedly reported and dramatically written account takes Litvinenko’s poisoning in a tony London hotel as a jumping-off point to examine the repression and paranoia that characterizes Russia under Vladimir Putin. Litvinenko overcame a troubled childhood and mediocre academic record to win a coveted position in the KGB. He had an average career, which ended when he became disgruntled over corruption within the KGB’s successor organization, the FSB. He moved to London and was frequently a target of Russian assassins, who bungled several efforts until November 1, 2006, when Litvinenko unknowingly drank tea laced with a radioactive isotope and lingered for 22 days before dying. Cowell tells the story with literary panache but doesn’t let his stylish prose eclipse the substance of a sordid tale. The sections about espionage and the assassination are worthy of Tom Clancy, but the author’s political analysis is equally riveting. In his judgment, the seemingly great strides toward democracy taken under Gorbachev and Yeltsin have been reversed by Putin, who has made Russia more authoritarian and less tolerant of dissent. The book’s only notable flaw results from Cowell’s need to share almost all of his admittedly impressive research—the narrative occasionally drags and goes off on tangents. In general, though, the text flows nicely through every twist and turn of the real-life plot, and the questions raised by the author are mostly answered.
A well-told true-crime tale mixed with expert political/historical analysis.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52355-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A cautionary tale that grabs the attention and holds it.
A disturbing account of one man’s shattering experience of being wrongly convicted of raping and murdering a young girl.
Lawyer/novelist Junkin (Good Counsel, 2001, etc.) opens his story by introducing Bob Morin, the lawyer who took on the case of Kirk Bloodsworth and succeeded in freeing him after Bloodsworth had spent nearly a decade in prison, some of it on death row. Morin located a lab in 1993 that could perform the sophisticated tests demonstrating that DNA from the sperm sample found on the victim’s clothing did not match Bloodsworth’s. The story then shifts back to 1984 and the murder of nine-year-old Dawn Hamilton and the subsequent arrest of Bloodsworth. Even though the outcome is known from the start, Junkin spins an absorbing tale that is partly police procedural, partly courtroom drama, and chock-full of human interest. Drawing on court transcripts, newspaper reports, and interviews with many of those involved, he shows how the eagerness of the police to make an arrest and their subsequent lax attention to correct procedures, especially involving witness identification, led to Bloodsworth’s indictment, and he captures the personalities of those involved and the details of the strategy and tactics of both prosecution and defense in the trial. Bloodsworth was convicted and sentenced to death, with execution stayed pending an automatic appeal. When Bloodsworth was retried in 1987, he was again found guilty, but this time a different judge sentenced him to two consecutive life terms. What is most difficult to read is Junkin’s vivid depiction of Bloodsworth’s time in prison. For a time, his despair led him to drugs, but he overcame his addiction and never stopped proclaiming his innocence, reading everything in the prison library that might help him prove it. When Joseph Wambaugh’s The Blooding alerted him to the possibility of DNA testing, he contacted Morin, who began the long process that eventually led to his freedom. Bloodsworth is now a vocal advocate of prison reform and opponent of capital punishment.
A cautionary tale that grabs the attention and holds it.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2004
ISBN: 1-56512-419-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Top-notch nonfiction legal thriller, reminding readers of the baseline: “This all comes down to one thing. It's all about...
EPA investigator Hilldorfer recounts his uncovering of a monstrous environmental crime, caught in all its venality and prosecutorial subterfuge.
Writing in the third person (assisted by novelist/lawyer Dugoni), Hilldorfer reminds readers that crimes against the environment, even those that directly impact human lives, are notoriously difficult to prosecute thanks to loopholes that have been gathering since the 1970s. But the crime recounted here was so blatant that defendant Alan Elias, even though represented by a particularly aggressive legal team, was sentenced to a $6-million fine and 17 years in prison. The outcome of the trial was far from a sure thing, however, and Hilldorfer’s tale does not necessarily renew faith in the legal process as regards the environment. Elias, who couldn't be troubled by “bothersome regulations,” owned and operated Evergreen Resources, a fertilizer plant in Idaho devoid of the most rudimentary safety precautions. He sent two men down into a tank to clear sludge containing hydrogen cyanide (“what the Nazis used to gas the Jews at Auschwitz”), and one of them, Scott Dominguez, suffered permanent brain damage. Initially, Hilldorfer recalls, he “equated the term brain damage to mental retardation . . . but Scott Dominguez knew what had happened to him, and that it had left him a prisoner in his own body.” The electrically charged narrative tells of former employees referring to Elias’s Evergreen Resources as “Everdeath,” and sums up Elias’s approach to employee safety in a comment prompted by one worker's ailments: “Fuck the headaches; fuck the dizziness; if you're not back to work on Wednesday, you're fired.” In economically depressed Soda Springs, Idaho, that could cause a man to jeopardize his life, as eloquently testified to by the holes in Dominguez’s basal ganglia.
Top-notch nonfiction legal thriller, reminding readers of the baseline: “This all comes down to one thing. It's all about money.”Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4652-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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