A tense, intricate legal thriller with an underdeveloped protagonist.
A young, debt-burdened lawyer finds herself trapped in a legal battle when her boss tries to frame her for murder.
Lawyer Shay Lambert enters an elevator with Lucy Barton-Jones at the headquarters of Claudine de Martineau International, the fashion conglomerate where they both work. When the doors open, Lucy is dead, making Shay either the witness to a suicide or a murderer. Insistent that it's the former, Shay has to muster all her legal know-how to absolve herself, until it becomes clear that her boss, J. Ingram Barrett Jr., the company's general counsel, is tampering with evidence in order to incriminate her. Now Shay has two goals: “Exoneration first. Then revenge.” Running parallel to this smartly crafted battle of wits is the less compelling story of Shay’s fall from grace after the 2008 financial crisis leaves her jobless and mired in seven-figure debt. The resulting portrait is of a ruthless lawyer whose five-year unemployment feels increasingly implausible in light of her superhuman intellect and diligence. Frequent references to the hackneyed advice doled out by her middle school guidance counselor (“Tell yourself you can do this, because you can. Tell yourself you’re the best, because you are”) gesture toward the origins of Shay’s grit but ultimately fail to convince. Still, author Kistler's steady pace and expert scene-writing add up to an enjoyable read.
A tense, intricate legal thriller with an underdeveloped protagonist.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-308914-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Tense, claustrophobic, and a bit hard to swallow.
When a girl frozen in ice at the Arctic Circle thaws out alive, an ancient Nordic languages specialist with troubles of her own is called to the scene.
Ferencik—author of Into the Jungle (2019)—specializes in thrillers set in wilderness environments with female protagonists; her latest takes us to the land of subzero temperatures and wind-whipped polar landscapes. But bad weather is just the beginning of the unpleasantness Val Chesterfield encounters when she overcomes her many phobias to fly out and help climate scientist Wyatt Speeks with his perplexing specimen. The girl he chopped out of the wall of a crevasse and defrosted is terrified, violent, and unintelligible. While Wyatt is creepy on many levels, creepiest of all is his unwillingness to discuss the death by exposure of his erstwhile lab partner, Val's twin brother, Andy. Andy's having gotten locked out of the house overnight in his underwear has been presented as a suicide, but neither Val nor her father, also a climate scientist, believe it. Belief is a problem all through this book—the elements made up to serve the plot rest on a foundation of real climate science, linguistics, and cultural history but still don't manage to be convincing. The five characters—Val, Wyatt, a nasty cook, and a pair of married marine scientists—are also less than lifelike. Saddled with mental health issues and bad manners, their interactions range from rude to abusive except for the married couple, who are so in love it's nauseating. You really wouldn't want to be stuck in a room with these people, which poor Val is much of the time, and now someone has stolen her anxiety meds and hidden the booze! She finds herself becoming deeply attached to the mystery girl, but progress with communication is slow, and the girl's health takes a drastic turn for the worse. And then they all go outside and things get crazy.
Tense, claustrophobic, and a bit hard to swallow.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9821-4302-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
A complex case fraught with angst and danger ends with surprising revelations.
Webb leaves behind her Birmingham police procedurals to focus on an investigator in Nashville who faces long odds in getting her life back on track.
Finley O’Sullivan is the only child of a powerful local family. She rarely sees her mother, a judge, but she maintains a warm relationship with her father and is blessed with a lifelong friendship with Matthew Quinn, a high-powered lawyer who always has her back. She’s especially treasured that friendship ever since the murder of her husband, Derrick, caused a breakdown that put paid to her job as an assistant district attorney. Instead, Finley’s taken a job as an investigator for alcoholic lawyer Jack Finnegan, an old family friend who’s working on a case that will change her life again. Charles Holmes, who’s in prison for multiple homicides, now claims that the murder of Lance Legard, a big man in the music scene, was not one of his. Lance’s widow, Sophia, hires Jack, her ex-lover, to protect the interests of her twin daughters, Cecelia and Olivia, whose father was suspected of molesting them. Cecelia lives at home and never goes out; Olivia graduated from college and moved to California. Finley still lives in the half-finished house Derrick bought when they married, but now she starts to learn things that shake her faith in him. Messy affairs and a love-hate relationship between the twins are only a few of the things that the highly intuitive Finley must work through to solve the mystery.
A complex case fraught with angst and danger ends with surprising revelations.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-3543-9
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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