An extremely well-executed courtroom novel, with a hero readers will want to meet again.
A fast-paced legal thriller turning on questions of sex, self-defense and murder.
At the beginning of Lewis’ lean, debut novel, trial lawyer Will Lively has just won a major court case for his employers at Austin-based Billings & Banks—a case with a multimillion-dollar payday, if the client ever agrees to settle in order to avoid a court verdict. The 30-something hotshot lawyer celebrates the victory, confident that it will prompt the firm’s executives to make him a shareholder. When his slimy boss, Dexter Billings, breaks the news that his promotion has been deferred yet again, Will is bitter. He questions the decision, especially after he’s spent the last five years working 60 hours a week, 51 weeks a year. With the help of his mentor, Buddy Cruz, and the firm’s office manager, Cindy Ellis (with whom he has an impromptu fling on his office couch shortly after he gets the bad news), Will learns that his big case is indeed paying out—and that the firm’s shareholders decided to delay promoting him so that their individual shares of the profit would be that much higher. Will confronts Dexter about this underhanded bad faith. Dexter counters by revealing that he tape-recorded Will and Cindy’s lovemaking, and the two men come to blows in Dexter’s office. When Dexter dives for the .44 Magnum he keeps in his desk, events turn deadly: Will ends up killing Dexter and standing trial himself, with the aid of the legendary defense attorney Justin Jackson (who bills at $1,800 an hour, paid by a mysterious benefactor). Lewis keeps all these complications moving at a satisfying clip, reflecting everything through Will’s approachable viewpoint. While the writing sometimes becomes clichéd (“one fell swoop,” for instance, or “rules were made to be broken”), the book’s final third, set during Will’s trial, is grippingly written, full of sharp dialogue, insider insights into the court system, and twists and well-placed revelations the reader won’t expect.
An extremely well-executed courtroom novel, with a hero readers will want to meet again.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 377
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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