by Dexter Dias ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 8, 1995
Has the Simpson trial soured you on the American legal system? This first novel about a writer on trial for murder makes the British system look twice as tawdry. Nobody, including the defendant himself, denies that wheelchair-bound Richard Kingsley is an unsavory character who cherishes unwholesome desires toward young girls. But did he wield the knife that stabbed teenaged Molly Summers 43 times among the rocky ruins of Stonebury Circle? Kingsley won't even give his own barrister, jaundiced Tom Fawley, a yes or no; he's content to drop oracular remarks about ``riding the Stang'' and compose even more cryptic notes (``The Past is a River of Many Streams'') that reduce the young witnesses against him to catatonic babbling. Tom's left without a clue how to conduct the defense of a client who first confessed to the murder, then whispered his determination to fight the charge as his barrister was entering his plea in court. But he fends off the prosecution's juicy hints of unspeakable druidical rites and falls back on a few unpromising leadsan alibi witness who may not exist, a witness the prosecution tried to bury, possible links to the suicide of a feminist husband-killer and to the old West Albion orphanage. Meanwhile, he's fallen as well into the velvety claws of junior prosecutor Justine Wright, who's already involved with the presiding judge but makes room for Tom, her best friend's husband. Though the sordid facts of the case and Tom's low-minded assessment of them are calculated to affront the most decorous sensibilities, the climactic series of tableaux, which force Tom to confront his own complicity with the client he so despises, will likely leave you gasping with disbelief rather than outrage. Tom's cynical approach to the practice of law is more raw and raunchy than anything in American courtroom drama. Judging from this entry, the entire British legal profession needs a good spankingand would probably love to have one.
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1995
ISBN: 0-89296-612-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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by Dexter Dias
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by Kathy Reichs
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by Kathy Reichs
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathy Reichs
by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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