O.J. Simpson assistant prosecutor Darden teams up with suspense writer Lochte (The Neon Smile, 1995, etc.) for this earnest, shapeless tale of—what else?—a stand-up deputy D.A. fighting for truth and justice in the jungles of Los Angeles. When the D.A.’s office finds the diamond ring that lately graced the finger of TV interviewer/gossip columnist Maddie Gray in the pocket of Jamal Deschamps, the South Central homeboy found fleeing from the alley where Maddie’s nude body has been dumped, they waste no time prosecuting the bejesus out of him. Nikki Hill, the deputy D.A. who’s just been recalled from a slow-death posting out in Compton, has a bad feeling about this case, but her boss, D.A. Joe Walden, orders a full-court press, and the race is on between the prosecutors and Jesse Fallon, the high-powered attorney who takes over Jamal’s defense. In no time, Jamal’s proved an alibi, and Walden & Co. are back to go. Wilting under the hostile TV lights, Walden demands another arrest, and the lucky number goes to Dyana Cooper Willins, a movie star married to a top music CEO. Even though there’s solid evidence that Dyana attacked Maddie (in self-defense? in an attempt to wrestle her blackmail folder away from the blackmailer?) with something an awful lot like the murder weapon, the stakes for two potentially wrongful prosecutions of African-Americans in the City of Angels are enormous. Darden and Lochte powerfully convey the desperation of a D.A.’s office under pressure to do something without any clear idea of what the something should be, and the infighting among prosecutors, politicians, and the police that hamstring the investigation. What they don’t do is bring any order to the investigation, or create characters—except for Nikki, your standard Wonder Woman with a troubled background—who stay in the memory longer than a news story. The result is an ant farm full of bustling but anonymous movement, a sociological primer that would take the skills of Tom Wolfe to turn it into a novel. “Trials” is right.
Pub Date: March 17, 1999
ISBN: 0-446-52326-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for...
What appears at first to be a double hate crime in a tiny Texas town turns out to be much more complicated—and more painful—than it seems.
With a degree from Princeton and two years of law school under his belt, Darren Mathews could have easily taken his place among the elite of African-American attorneys. Instead, he followed his uncle’s lead to become a Texas Ranger. “What is it about that damn badge?” his estranged wife, Lisa, asks. “It was never intended for you.” Darren often wonders if she’s right but nonetheless finds his badge useful “for working homicides with a racial element—murders with a particularly ugly taint.” The East Texas town of Lark is small enough to drive through “in the time it [takes] to sneeze,” but it’s big enough to have had not one, but two such murders. One of the victims is a black lawyer from Chicago, the kind of crusader-advocate Darren could have been if he’d stayed on his original path; the other is a young white woman, a local resident. Both battered bodies were found in a nearby bayou. His job already jeopardized by his role in a race-related murder case in another part of the state, Darren eases his way into Lark, where even his presence is enough to raise hackles among both the town’s white and black residents; some of the latter, especially, seem reluctant and evasive in their conversations with him. Besides their mysterious resistance, Darren also has to deal with a hostile sheriff, the white supremacist husband of the dead woman, and the dead lawyer’s moody widow, who flies into town with her own worst suspicions as to what her husband was doing down there. All the easily available facts imply some sordid business that could cause the whole town to explode. But the deeper Darren digs into the case, encountering lives steeped in his home state’s musical and social history, the more he begins to distrust his professional—and personal—instincts.
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for this deftly plotted whodunit whose writing pulses throughout with a raw, blues-inflected lyricism.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-36329-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A top-notch psychological thriller.
In Hoag’s (The 9th Girl, 2013, etc.) latest, talented young newscaster Dana Nolan is left to navigate a psychological maze after escaping a serial killer.
While recuperating at home in Shelby Mills, Indiana, Dana meets her former high school classmates John Villante and Tim Carver. Football hero Tim is ashamed of flunking out of West Point, and now he’s a sheriff’s deputy. After Iraq and Afghanistan tours, John’s home with PTSD, "angry and bitter and dark." Dana survived abduction by serial killer Doc Holiday, but she still suffers from the gruesome attack by "the man who ruined her life, destroyed her career, shattered her sense of self, damaged her brain and her face." What binds the trio is their friend Casey Grant, who's been missing five years, perhaps also a Holiday victim, even if "[t]he odds against that kind of coincidence had to be astronomical." Hoag’s first 100 pages are a gut-wrenching dissection of the aftereffects of traumatic brain injury: Dana is plagued by "[f]ear, panic, grief, and anger" and haunted by fractured memories and nightmares. "Before Dana had believed in the inherent good in people. After Dana knew firsthand their capacity for evil." Impulsive and paranoid, Dana obsesses over linking Casey’s disappearance to Holiday, with her misfiring brain convincing her that "finding the truth about what had happened to Casey [was] her chance of redemption." But then Hoag tosses suspects into the narrative faster than Dana can count: Roger Mercer, Dana’s self-absorbed state senator stepfather; Mack Villante, who left son John with "no memories of his father that didn’t include drunkenness and cruelty"; even Hardy, the hard-bitten, cancer-stricken detective who investigated Casey’s disappearance. Tense, tightly woven, with every minor character, from Dana’s fiercely protective aunt to Mercer’s pudgy campaign chief, ratcheting up the tension, Hoag’s narrative explodes with an unexpected but believable conclusion.
A top-notch psychological thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95454-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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