An engrossing tale about the difficulty of discerning justice through the murk of New York’s melting pot.
A put-upon prosecutor investigates a racially charged murder in this spicy legal drama.
It seems like an open-and-shut case when a Hasidic Jewish man is stabbed to death on a Brooklyn street, and his alleged assailant, identified by three witnesses, is caught minutes later by the Hasidic Shomrim foot patrol. It’s 1991, the Crown Heights crime scene is a powder keg of ethnic tension, and the perp is a Puerto Rican man. The Hasidim want a quick conviction, while the Hispanic community cries racial profiling. Assistant district attorney Carmen Rodriguez–used to being on the receiving end of bigoted presumptions–finds herself navigating a political minefield. Then the witnesses turn out to be unreliable (one, a Talmudic scholar, seems to be possessed by the spirit of a dead crack whore), an alibi surfaces for the defendant, a diamond is mysteriously stolen from the dead man’s safe and Carmen wonders whether she’s prosecuting the right man. Alas, her commitment to justice often clashes with her instinct for self-preservation. Carmen’s boss, eager to placate the politically powerful Hasidim, insists that she sweep the case’s untidy details under the rug, while cagey defense counsel Pai Ho Wu threatens to publicize Carmen’s porno pics from her student days unless she reveals prosecution secrets. Out of Carmen’s travails the authors craft a crime procedural that’s lively, if sometimes lacking in finesse. They ladle out rather a lot of ethnic shtick in depicting Brooklyn’s culture wars and complicate third-act problems by unaccountably sidelining their heroine for most of the trial scenes, which are handily stolen by the riveting Wu before fizzling out. Fortunately, they stock the story with sharply drawn characters (the eternally kvetching but tough-as-nails presiding judge is a hoot), cannily observed procedural and intriguing courtroom twists that will keep readers guessing.
An engrossing tale about the difficulty of discerning justice through the murk of New York’s melting pot.Pub Date: June 21, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-595-40100-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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