An enjoyable zigzagging plot, though it’s the rather sensational Holly who leaves the strongest impression.
In Chisholm and Kim’s debut legal thriller, a Korean-American attorney works multiple, possibly linked, high-stakes cases.
Holly Park, dismayed after receiving no acknowledgment for a multimillion dollar case she brought to her firm, leaves for the more modest American Legal Services in Koreatown in Los Angeles. There, she meets the Dumok, Koreatown’s reputed “godfather.” He asks Holly to find his wife, Nara Song, if she’s alive. He believes Nara and their child died in childbirth decades earlier, but recent rumors suggest otherwise. Holly’s other client, Kendall Taylor, still wants to know why her ex-husband, Wolf Linser, left her years before. Wolf is seven years into a prison sentence for sex with his underage stepdaughter, Naomi. Kendall, however, has doubts on that conviction and enlists Holly to look into Wolf’s suspicious current wife, Alexis Lee. Around the same time, cops arrest Naomi for the stabbing death of a local councilman. Delving into these cases, Holly exposes the occasional connection between clients and stirs up quite a few secrets. She also catches the wrong kind of attention. Someone, in order to halt her investigation, wants to make certain Holly has an “accident.” The authors’ fragmented narrative, with seemingly unrelated subplots, eventually fuses into a labyrinthine mystery. The protagonist boasts a distinctive heritage, making her a virtual loner. Boss Kate Hong mocks Holly for speaking only a modicum of Korean, while others think she is Chinese. Holly, a deft professional, conducts lengthy interrogations with Wolf in jail and excels in the disappointingly short courtroom scenes. Though the mystery sometimes relies on coincidences, there’s a plethora of surprises, and not merely regarding Holly’s cases. Kate, for example, is doing something at American Legal Services that the FBI frowns upon. The authors fill their pages with striking, unforgettable metaphors; inmate Wolf is described as “skittish, like a rescue animal.”
An enjoyable zigzagging plot, though it’s the rather sensational Holly who leaves the strongest impression.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61296-972-5
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck's peculiarly intense simplicity of technique is admirably displayed in this vignette — a simple, tragic tale of Mexican little people, a story retold by the pearl divers of a fishing hamlet until it has the quality of folk legend. A young couple content with the humble living allowed them by the syndicate which controls the sale of the mediocre pearls ordinarily found, find their happiness shattered when their baby boy is stung by a scorpion. They dare brave the terrors of a foreign doctor, only to be turned away when all they can offer in payment is spurned. Then comes the miracle. Kino find a great pearl. The future looks bright again. The baby is responding to the treatment his mother had given. But with the pearl, evil enters the hearts of men:- ambition beyond his station emboldens Kino to turn down the price offered by the dealers- he determines to go to the capital for a better market; the doctor, hearing of the pearl, plants the seed of doubt and superstition, endangering the child's life, so that he may get his rake-off; the neighbors and the strangers turn against Kino, burn his hut, ransack his premises, attack him in the dark — and when he kills, in defense, trail him to the mountain hiding place- and kill the child. Then- and then only- does he concede defeat. In sorrow and humility, he returns with his Juana to the ways of his people; the pearl is thrown into the sea.... A parable, this, with no attempt to add to its simple pattern.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1947
ISBN: 0140187383
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1947
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
