A controlled, entertaining legal thriller about a lawyer dragged into a lawless conflict.
Smelser (Truth to Tell, 2016, etc.) tells the story of a small-town lawyer caught up in an escalating feud in this legal thriller.
Grant Russell has a pretty desirable life. The attorney specializes in family law at his father-in-law’s firm in quaint Arbor, Iowa. He lives with his wife and their two young daughters in a farmhouse on a big spread outside of town. One morning, while jogging down his road, Grant comes across two men in a pickup truck knocking over his neighbors’ mailboxes with a baseball bat. When Grant confronts them, they pelt him with a beer can and drive off, leaving him angry and more than a little embarrassed. He tries to forget the incident. He has enough to worry about at work; a colleague’s imminent retirement means he will become a full partner of the firm. What’s more, Lenore Patton, another colleague, has been making it clear that she wishes to sleep with him. When the truck containing the two mailbox vandals cuts off Grant in traffic, he gets the plate numbers and decides to call the sheriff, a decision which he quickly comes to second guess: “If there’s one thing I know about myself it’s that I’m not comfortable with confrontation and so I avoid it whenever possible. And as I thought about that, I had to ask myself again what the hell I was thinking in my weekend set-to over the mailboxes.” The vandals, cousins and small-time criminals named Rodney and Eugene Rickart, realize who turned them in and begin taking their revenge on Grant with increasingly aggressive acts of destruction. Even worse, Lenore Patton—spurned by Grant’s rejections of her advances—agrees to represent them in a harassment complaint against Grant. What began as a simple matter of mailbox vandalism quickly balloons into something far more sinister, and it won’t end before multiple people are dead. Smelser writes in clean, expressive prose that captures Grant’s increasing paranoia as the plot develops: “I suddenly realized I had no idea what kind of guys these were or what they were capable of. Irresponsible, hard-drinking rednecks, yes. But were they dangerous?” Grant’s insecurity is a great driving force of the narrative and lends some depth to a character who might have otherwise seemed contrived. The author has a knack for getting quickly at characters’ deeper motivations, allowing the reader to connect with them in a way that is not often seen in a legal thriller. Smelser is comfortable allowing his cast to be flawed in mundane ways, which lends the story a whiff of disturbing inevitability. The exception is perhaps the flat, manipulative Lenore Patton. Smelser guides the plot in interesting directions from start to finish, as small decisions and secrets compound to unleash unanticipated and tragic ramifications. Once the reader begins listening to Grant’s tale, they may not be able to walk away.
A controlled, entertaining legal thriller about a lawyer dragged into a lawless conflict.Pub Date: April 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5301-9990-7
Page Count: 294
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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