A rising star in the New York District Attorney’s office suffers her first loss, the high profile prosecution of a defendant accused of a grisly homicide, and spirals into an emotional meltdown that ultimately ensnares her in a dangerous web of drugs, violence and terrorism.
Smith, a trial attorney in Atlanta, Ga., makes good use of his professional experience in this debut novel. The early scenes are packed with engaging cat-and-mouse courtroom drama. A devastating cross-examination of the defendant appears to leave little doubt that prosecutor Sharon Weinstock will win another conviction—that is, until a hung jury results in a mistrial. Weinstock is a compelling character—a young attorney who is tightly wound and keeps her life exceedingly well organized. When she unravels, it is in spectacular form, beginning with an uncharacteristic flight to Aruba and a night of drunken abandon. After an improbable tryst with the very defendant she had been trying to convict, Weinstock finds herself involved with a series of psychopathic charmers who test the limits of her courage and previously untapped skills in a deadly contest set against the backdrop of the second Gulf War. The writing is occasionally uneven (and grammarians may cringe at the haphazard switching of tenses throughout the novel), but Smith keeps the tension steady, providing surprising alliances and backstabbers. A satisfying love interest offers moments of respite from the violence that emerges behind every corner. The nature of “Operation Hydra” itself does not emerge until the final chapters. Were it not for the title and the dust jacket details, readers might not immediately suspect the scope of the larger conspiracy. The major premise of the book becomes less important than the adventure itself. And readers who grow to enjoy Weinstock’s sharp mind and indefatigable determination will be pleased that Smith has set the stage for the possible reappearance of his heroine in a sequel. An entertaining page-turner for devotees of international thrillers.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462898800
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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