A solid thriller at its best in lawyer mode.
In McCarty’s (Jonathan’s Travails, 2012) legal thriller, a retired California attorney tries to settle a murdered man’s vast estate, but a trio of avaricious lawyers stands in his way.
Austin Wells is done with legal work, so he’s reluctant to help former girlfriend Adele Ogden after an anonymous caller tells her that her brother Frankie’s been killed in Mexico. Nevertheless, he travels to Ensenada with Adele and identifies Frankie’s body, the throat slit. Back in the U.S., a law firm has already searched the dead man’s home and claims to have found a will that leaves Frankie’s wealth to his boyfriend, Nate, and the Catholic Church. Austin is skeptical of the lawyers—one of them raided Frankie’s safety deposit box without first informing Adele—but he insists Adele hire another attorney because Austin isn’t a probate lawyer. Adele, however, doesn’t immediately take his advice, and Austin, it seems, is stuck arguing a case against a group of lawyers whose greed is boundless. Despite murder as its starting point, McCarty’s novel centers on Austin’s legal struggle; his primary battle is trying to prove that the will discovered by the firm isn’t valid. He’s faced with other obstacles as well, the most intriguing being the lawyers Austin hires for assistance who turn out to be just as greedy as the opposing counsel. Interestingly, the murder barely qualifies as a subplot; even Adele, who was understandably upset when her brother’s death was confirmed, isn’t invested in learning who killed Frankie or why. Yet readers won’t care: Frankie is the story’s most unsympathetic character, much more unscrupulous than any of the attorneys and doing at least a few things that may make the majority of readers want to take a shower. Austin is an imposing protagonist, formidable in the courtroom even if he’s only making a motion. It’s disappointing that his story is interrupted by a flashback that follows Frankie and others for nearly half the novel. Regardless of how slimy Frankie could be, his story is utterly fascinating, as he amasses a fortune in Europe and countless reasons for any number of people to want him dead. The ending, thankfully, steers clear of a superficial wrap-up, instead opting to leave behind a smoldering legal battlefield.
A solid thriller at its best in lawyer mode.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1480811652
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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