This novel certainly doesn’t skimp on twisty plot turns, but retains an understated, authentic approach to the law.
A Los Angeles lawyer defends a professional safecracker accused of murder in Rucker’s debut legal thriller.
Criminal defense attorney Bobby Earl gladly takes a case when the public defender is unavailable, especially after a judge assures him that he’ll be paid. Sydney Seabrooke is facing a murder charge, and evidence points to his presence at a Chinese restaurant where the body of LA cop Terry Horgan was found. Seabrooke professes his innocence, but the fact that he was at the scene of the crime in order to break into a safe doesn’t look good. But Earl is inclined to believe Seabrooke, who says he was pulling the job for bondsman Johnny Aradano in exchange for bail for an earlier, unrelated arrest. It also turns out that Horgan wasn’t an upstanding officer; although the cop didn’t own the restaurant, he did own the safe inside it, and Earl suspects that its contents—bulky stacks of cash—may have been the spoils of Horgan’s involvement with drug dealers. Before the trial begins, there’s a break-in at Earl’s office, and jailhouse snitch Jake “The Snake” Snyder claims that Seabrooke confessed to the murder. The attorney’s investigation into the seedy world of drugs provokes some dangerous people, but he still hopes to find a witness for the defense—or maybe even a killer. Rucker’s muted thriller steers clear of convention; there’s no glaring piece of evidence, for example, that guarantees that Earl will save his client. The story acknowledges its realism with humor, including nods to the TV series Law & Order (“most young women DA’s had chosen to emulate the female television prosecutors on ‘Law and Order,’ which meant exuding a toughness just short of announcing ‘mine are bigger than yours’ ”). Earl faces some other hurdles before and during the trial: he unintentionally irks television personality Thomas Glass (aka “The Thumb,” who has a knack for tipping scales of opinion one way or the other), and someone else threatens and takes a few shots at the lawyer. Overall, Earl’s a shrewd, worthy protagonist, surrounded by exceptional characters, including reliable investigator Manny Munoz and second-chair district attorney Samantha Price.
This novel certainly doesn’t skimp on twisty plot turns, but retains an understated, authentic approach to the law.Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9913274-7-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: Chickadee Prince Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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