Former death-row attorney Blum debuts—with yet another down-at-the-heels lawyer, another uncooperative client, another hopeless case. As he stands talking to premier topless dancer Sally Sutton in the parking lot of the Mustang Club, LAPD vice cop Joe Richards is shot three times. The cops, led by hotheaded SWAT specialist Jim Rowinski and the D.A.'s inside man, Lt. Thomas Gallagher, naturally call on the man Sally identifies—gang- banger Juan Thomas—and arrest him when they find the murder gun on the premises; and the D.A.'s chief trial deputy, Howard Ainsworth, duly selects a sacrificial lamb to defend him. The lucky lawyer is John Solomon, Ainsworth's predecessor in the chief deputy's spot, now (since the brief, incendiary affair with Mary Delgado, the arresting officer on an earlier high-profile case, got him tossed out of the office) perusing his briefs over long liquid lunches. There's not a chance in the world that Solomon, who's shrunk into a painfully inept litigator who comes out of every cross-examination with more egg on his face, can get his unsavory client acquitted, and within just a few pages he's already blown off the preliminary hearing and is slouching to trial. But wait! Could it be that Mary Delgado's back in the picture again, helping Solomon dig up the dirt on her buddies in the D.A.'s office? Could Joe Richards have been killed because he knew too much about his own department? Could Sally Sutton be lying as part of a police cover-up? Could Ainsworth, running hard for D.A. himself, have an Achilles' heel—his white-hot hatred of (gasp) ``secular humanism'' as the true villain behind the epidemic violence in LA? First-novelist Blum sketches out a scenario of public corruption and private redemption as preposterous as it is predictable. Move to strike, Your Honor. Incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial.
Pub Date: April 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93905-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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