A spirited, often comical courtroom tale brimming with genuine characters.
In this dramedy, a legal secretary tackles a friend’s personal injury case, which requires posing as a lawyer—her dead boss.
Gertie Chase and Dorothy “Dot” Swayne have been working for Louise Barbour for nearly two decades when the Texas attorney suddenly dies at her desk. Louise’s indolent son, Clarence, who wants the building to open a vape shop, demands the private practice’s files be farmed out to other lawyers. But one file catches Gertie’s eye: a personal injury case involving her longtime friend Nelda Fay Blatchford. Nelda’s husband, Clifford, had developed cancer, which a doctor determined was from exposure to asbestos at work. As Louise apparently neglected the matter and Clifford has since died, Gertie decides to see the case through, with help from Dot and their co-worker/friend Guadalupe “Lupe” Maria Sylvia-Sotomayor. Gertie will just have to take on the role of Louise, but only until she can reach a settlement. When Clifford’s ex-boss Waite Morrison doesn’t show up to the mediation and his attorney, Alexander Shiras, makes a lowball offer, Gertie and Nelda opt for a trial. Having picked up skills by assisting Louise, Gertie can hold her own in the ensuing courtroom battle, provided no one learns her true identity. Clary (Unfinished Business, 2016, etc.) tactfully deals with serious subjects. Gertie worries about her husband, Jack, who experiences frequent pain from Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, and Nelda, who’s Creole, is no stranger to racism (likely the reason Louise abandoned her case). But there’s also humor in abundance. An example—and the book’s highlight—is when Gertie, whose car is blocking Shiras’ at the mediation, feigns a prolonged search for her keys. The author’s flair for rapid-fire dialogue leads to bustling courtroom scenes, which monopolize the novel’s latter half. These scenes furthermore distinguish the amiable heroine (small-town Gertie easily connects with prospective jurors) from antagonistic Shiras, who constantly objects and interrupts witnesses he’s questioning on the stand.
A spirited, often comical courtroom tale brimming with genuine characters.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-5382-5
Page Count: 285
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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