A compelling courtroom drama that overcomes its limitations.
Two Polish American lawyers defend a Black Latinx activist in this sequel.
In this legal thriller, Charns brings back Star Gwiazda and her law partner, Zenko Luczek, now court-appointed attorneys defending Marcos Salazar Jones against charges of shooting a Durham, North Carolina, police officer. Zenko is certain that the officer shot himself and framed Marcos, a local Black Lives Matter activist. But the lawyer has his doubts about whether the jury will agree, or if the talented but unpredictable Star’s courtroom theatrics will be too much. The tension remains high from jury selection to verdict, with the toppling of a local Confederate statue and vandalism and violence against Star and Zenko making life outside the courtroom just as complicated. The story’s subplots touch on a wide range of topics, from hockey and the Polish American experience—Zenko’s narration often turns to his childhood in Detroit’s Polish community—to the law partners’ histories of mental illness, while keeping a focus on the events taking place inside the courtroom. The narration is cynical and biting (the police officer is “a Robocop Mr. Clean without the earring”; Zenko attributes his success to “Al-Anon, hockey and staying out of bad relationships, not necessarily in that order”) as well as entertaining, keeping the pages turning despite the almost too-detailed courtroom play-by-plays. While the book spends more time on the minutiae of legal practice, precedent, and witness questioning than most in the genre, it does so in a way that feels informative and engaging rather than tedious. The novel does have its limitations. Some typos are distracting (“The smell of lemon-scented bleach, sweat, and sewage envelope us”), and a plot twist on the work’s penultimate page turns the tale’s emotional resolution on its head, cutting into the sense of vindication that dominates to that point. But on the whole, the thriller is a satisfying read, telling a solid story while exploring questions of faith, Whiteness, and relationships and incorporating current events and present-day realities into the framework of a classic fight-the-system tale.
A compelling courtroom drama that overcomes its limitations.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 225
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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