Entertaining, humorous, exhilarating, and featuring impressive characters, this legal thriller turns out to be a winner.
A law professor gets caught up in intrigue connected with a campus shooter and Nazi-looted art in this debut novel.
Nell Hatley—a 30-something professor at Coppersmith University Law School, near Cincinnati, in her tenure year—arrives late to a faculty meeting and to mayhem: a gun-wielding woman pushes her way inside and starts firing. Nell heroically tackles the shooter, getting a kick in the head. One professor, Lawrence McIntosh, is shot dead and another, Hardik Gruziet, grazed by Marlyse Revinson, a first-year law student whom Nell vaguely remembers. Disturbingly, a handwritten note in Revinson’s pocket bears three names: McIntosh, Gruziet—and Hatley. The investigation soon starts looking fishy: though failing grades are blamed for Revinson’s breakdown, Nell knows she entered a B grade—which mysteriously became an F. And why was McIntosh brought in as an expert witness on an art theft case, not his specialty? And who is responsible for torpedoing Nell’s tenure chances? At the center of the mystery is a Monet painting, Girl with Egg Basket, once owned by the Rosenthals and stolen by Nazis. Nell investigates with help from her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Luca Giardano, a rising star at a Washington, D.C., law firm, and the Mouse, Luca’s wickedly smart paralegal (and a formidable young woman). As Nell and her allies get closer to the truth, the story builds to a dangerous confrontation. In his thriller, Crane (Antitrust [Aspen Treatise], 2014, etc.), a law professor at the University of Michigan, proves an able storyteller, mixing humor, suspense, and a little romance, plus history, travel, well-explained legal issues, and a fine appreciation for university politics. His characters are well-rounded, and the Mouse—a law school dropout with great resources—is an especially delightful creation, fun to watch as she adopts various personae to winkle out information. Nell’s memories of a childhood friend, in whose tragedy she feels guiltily complicit, gives her compassion for Revinson and drives her determination to uncover the truth. This, along with serious matters of theft and murder, helps balance the book’s often comic tone. Nicely done.
Entertaining, humorous, exhilarating, and featuring impressive characters, this legal thriller turns out to be a winner.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 377
Publisher: DartFrog Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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