A thoughtful and often comedically sharp reflection on political corruption.
A journalist uncovers a sprawling conspiracy that may implicate the president of the United States in Rothman’s political suspense novel.
Jonathan Stone, a veteran reporter for the Washington Telegram, sets his investigative sights on a dangerous subject, Seymour “Sy” Solomon, a remarkably powerful and deep-pocketed real estate mogul who seems to be beloved by everyone; he’s widely admired for his self-propelled rise to riches and lauded everywhere for his philanthropic efforts. He’s even close friends with George McWilliams, Stone’s boss and the editor of the newspaper. Nevertheless, Stone finds it impossible to ignore the fact that Solomon, who owns half the federal office leases in Washington, D.C., keeps receiving lucrative government contracts—Stone’s gut tells him the man is a “born grabber.” The more Stone digs, the dirtier Solomon seems. For one, he has an uncomfortably close relationship with the General Services Administration (GSA), the government’s business and record-keeping agency; he also contributes campaign dollars to all the coffers of the members of Congress (irrespective of party affiliation) and maintains murky business ties to President Eddy Bullard. Moreover, an edifice Solomon built that now houses the Internal Revenue Service at Vulture’s Point on the Potomac is so poorly constructed it seems on the verge of collapse, a danger confirmed by Stone’s girlfriend (and obsessive lover of Kafka), Margo Danialson, a minor bureaucrat at GSA. Rothman unfurls a morbidly entangled conspiracy, one that includes murder, suicide, and a nuclear-energy scandal. In fact, there’s simply too much crammed into this novel, a surfeit of subplots, backstories, and dispensable characters. Still, Rothman captures the aura of dark nihilism in some quarters of the political world with great power. Here, Solomon casually acknowledges that his building will eventually fall: “Solomon shrugged and frowned like a pacifist accused of the My Lai massacre. ‘Of course it’s falling down. All buildings fall down someday. All people die someday.’” This is a riveting work, mordantly insightful and surprisingly entertaining.
A thoughtful and often comedically sharp reflection on political corruption.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798985181852
Page Count: 345
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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