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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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