A captivating legal thriller that’s impressively unpredictable.
A courtroom thriller depicts a friendly rivalry turned deadly.
Elliot Barrett’s life is an enviable one. He’s a prestigious physician with a thriving practice, a well-appointed home in New York City, a devoted wife, and two loving children. He risks it all when he becomes romantically involved with Lindsey Anderson, the seductive daughter of a patient. When she turns up dead, the police immediately blame Elliot. There is incontrovertible evidence placing him in her apartment and damning if circumstantial evidence suggestive of a sexual affair. Elliot decides to deny the tryst and enlists the help of his best friend, Ted Lapoltsky, a successful lawyer, to defend him. Unbeknownst to Elliot, Ted also had an affair with Lindsey and wanted to leave his wife for her, a design she squarely rejected. Ted and Lindsey had become locked in a passionate argument about it, and when she revealed she was also seeing Elliot, Ted grabbed her in a jealous fury, causing her to hit her head and sink into unconsciousness. While Ted defends Elliot, he’s careful to avoid even a hint of self-incrimination. He also revels in the opportunity to see his prudishly judgmental rival publicly disgraced. Elliot’s world begins to crumble around him. His wife’s trust wanes, his family is mortified, and his professional reputation’s tarnished. Debut author Pinto meticulously constructs a view of Ted’s long-standing envy. He worked indefatigably to rise above his inauspicious beginnings while Elliot was born into privilege—and yet Ruth, Elliot’s wife, looks down on him as a coarse careerist. The prose is plain but the plot a compelling one; it’s consistently tense and defies expectations. However, Pinto has a grating tendency to provide far too much explanatory commentary, apparently reluctant to allow the reader to draw their own inferences from the action: “How ironic that Elliot had to meet Lindsey to introduce him to the temptations he was preaching against. Apparently Elliot was after this hormone effect also. How odd that we both ended up enjoying the same woman. Elliot had fallen under her spell.”
A captivating legal thriller that’s impressively unpredictable.Pub Date: July 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-942762-54-6
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Heliotrope Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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