In this debut legal novel, an innocent Wall Street executive becomes the subject of a misguided criminal investigation.
New York, 2012. Emma Simpson, the manager of the Manhattan office of the hedge fund Otis Capital, dashes off an email before leaving work for the day. It’s a routine missive encouraging the members of her team to follow the company’s document retention policy. Then she drives home to her husband and two children on their Hudson Valley farm. One year later, Otis Capital is the target of an insider trading investigation conducted by the United States Attorney’s office, and Emma—without realizing it—has become its primary person of interest. Word comes down that she needs to lawyer up. “Did she really need her own big-shot defense lawyer?” wonders Emma. “The company already had a very expensive law firm with a bunch of former federal prosecutors handling the subpoena. Was there something they weren’t telling her?” And after all, she didn’t do anything wrong. Regardless, Emma finds herself in the sights of two ambitious federal prosecutors—one on the fast track to a prominent career and one afraid that he isn’t—and it might not matter who, if anyone, is actually guilty. The wheels of justice are in motion, and Emma is trapped directly in their path. Shapiro’s prose is clean and fluid, capturing the intricacies of finance law and the emotional states of her characters with equal clarity: “Emma stared at the empty yellow pad in front of her and tapped her pencil on it repeatedly. She felt numb and disconnected from her surroundings. It was as if she had just discovered she’d been living in a simulation for the past forty-five years with no ability to control a destiny that was simply the product of algorithms in someone else’s computer program.” The author demonstrates a convincing familiarity with Wall Street and financial prosecution, and the characters, even the minor ones, are memorably constructed. Emma has frustratingly little control over her own story, which robs the book of some of its potential dynamism but illustrates for readers how powerless an innocent person often is before the law.
A terrifyingly detailed, engrossing tale about what happens when the judicial hammer comes down.Pub Date: March 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63730-640-6
Page Count: 278
Publisher: New Degree Press
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: SUSPENSE | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | GENERAL FICTION
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
84
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Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
With the United States the “closest [it’s] been to war” in a lifetime, intelligence operative Jack Ryan Jr. faces stiff odds in trying to avert disaster with China.
Trouble with China begins brewing (yet again in the Clancy books) with the rendition of a Chinese scientist and the killing of his American brother, a specialist in machine learning. With a sniper attack on the German outpost of The Campus, Ryan’s “off-the-books” agency, and the downing of an American plane over the South China Sea, U.S. efforts to recover a Chinese undersea glider capable of detecting a $3 billion American stealth submarine are in jeopardy. Things look especially grim with the capture of crash survivor John Clark, Ryan’s boss and a close compadre of his father, President Jack Ryan Sr. With Ryan Sr. still shaken by the abduction of his wife a year ago and Ryan Jr. doubtful of his abilities as a team leader, it's up to intelligence director Mary Pat Foley to calm the waters with her expertise and strong will. One possible outcome is a Chinese attack on Taiwan. In Bentley’s third outing in the series, it takes a while to get past cookie cutter stuff: Many pages go by before the reader knows what all the tense language, chase scenes, and international travel are about. But the book's cool, checkerboard efficiency eventually takes hold. And the streaks of vulnerability that run through the Ryans impart a human dimension that most such thrillers lack. Bentley also takes pains to distinguish the novel from fake fiction: “Unlike in the movies, getting struck by a rifle round moving at several thousand feet per second was not insignificant.”
A well-turned, if predictable, installment in the popular series.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422786
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Categories: SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | POLITICAL, MILITARY & TERRORISM
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