Dan Sheridan, one of the slicker members of Boston's criminal bar (The Indictment, 1994), accepts a civil suit that pits him against the city's legal, medical, and religious powers in another arresting case-history of health care gone wrong from old pro Reed (chairman of the Massachusetts Trial Lawyers Association). Donna DiTullio, a stressed-out tennis prodigy who attempts suicide at age 22, sustains massive paralytic injuries in the wake of a five-story fall from an atrium balcony at St. Anne's Hospital. The maimed girl's distraught parents retain Sheridan to sue the hospital, its owner (the Roman Catholic Archdiocese), and her physician—Dr. Robert Sexton, a world-class psychiatrist. Mother Church quickly calls in heavy-hitting Charles Finnerty to defend its financial interests. With help from partner Tom Buckley, the undaunted plaintiff's counsel begins digging into the backgrounds of everyone connected to his client's near-fatal plunge. In the course of these inquiries, Sheridan unearths disturbing evidence that Sexton's top-drawer credentials mask a dark past. While the opposition gets the better of preliminary courtroom skirmishes, Sheridan (a resilient Vietnam vet) soldiers on, even managing to establish rudimentary communications with voiceless Donna. The game gets appreciably rougher as the determined advocate presses for answers to the question of why a vulnerable mental patient was left unattended in an open area, and hHe eventually comes close enough to the truth to draw potentially murderous fire from an anonymous assailant while jogging. Before the proceedings are fairly under way, however, Sheridan risks all to engineer an ethically iffy, out-of-court confrontation that ensures approximately appropriate forms of justice for all parties. Although a seemingly pivotal character (a psych-unit nurse) drops out of sight early on and Sexton's use of a Prozac-like medication turns out to be a red herring, Reed once again makes the machinations of big-time attorneys immensely entertaining.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-517-70156-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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