by Felix Rocha, Jr. ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 19, 2015
An extraordinary story with a muddled execution.
A freighter smuggling kidnapped Chinese children into the United States is commandeered by the authorities in Rocha’s debut novel.
In 1995, Phil is an Immigration and Naturalization Service senior special agent assigned to its Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit, sometimes referred to as “Strike Force.” When a Chinese freighter in the Pacific Ocean is stopped and boarded by members of the U.S. Coast Guard, they discover 160 illegal immigrants, clearly headed for the United States. Phil is sent to Wake Island to interview the passengers, and he soon realizes that about 30 young boys are also onboard who aren’t related to the adults. He quickly uncovers the dark truth: these kids were kidnapped from their families to be sold into slavery, and many have been the victims of grim abuse, including rape. Phil is able to determine who the “snakeheads,” or smugglers, are, and their leader in the United States strategically applies for political asylum in order to avoid repatriation back to China. Much of the book reads like an official governmental record: there are the transcripts of testimony given by the kidnapped boys (in Chinese and English); transcripts from an asylum hearing for one of the snakeheads; notes from the interviews with the passengers; and even grainy black-and-white photographs. There’s also a subplot that follows a Russian spy who offers Phil (and Sharron, an FBI agent and Phil’s good friend) information about the sale of a nuclear bomb by the Russian Mafia. Rocha spent 30 years doing exactly Phil’s job, and so he confidently writes about both the nature of human trafficking and its investigation. The plotline about the smuggled children, in particular, is as mesmerizing as it is sad. However, the author calls his work a “quasi-fictional account” while also saying that he aims at the “pursuit of truth and accuracy”; the result of this is that the reader may be left confused about the line between creative contrivance and actual history. The subplot involving the Russian Mafia also seems completely gratuitous. As a result, it’s not clear why Rocha didn’t simply write a nonfiction memoir.
An extraordinary story with a muddled execution.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5028-2820-0
Page Count: 174
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Sidney Powell ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2014
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.
A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.
Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs. In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Maryland decision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61254-149-5
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Brown Books
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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by Elizabeth Smart with Chris Stewart ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2013
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered...
The inspirational and ultimately redemptive story of a teenage girl’s descent into hell, framed as a parable of faith.
The disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 made national headlines, turning an entire country into a search party; it seemed like something of a miracle when she reappeared, rescued almost by happenstance, nine months later. As the author suggests, it was something of a mystery that her ordeal lasted that long, since there were many times when she was close to being discovered. Her captors, a self-proclaimed religious prophet whose sacraments included alcohol, pornography and promiscuous sex, and his wife and accomplice, jealous of this “second wife” he had taken, weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. In fact, his master plan was for similar kidnappings to give him seven wives in all, though Elizabeth’s abduction was the only successful one. She didn’t write her account for another nine years, at which point she had a more mature perspective on the ordeal, and with what one suspects was considerable assistance from co-author Stewart, who helps frame her story and fill in some gaps. Though the account thankfully spares readers the graphic details, Smart tells of the abuse and degradation she suffered, of the fear for her family’s safety that kept her from escaping and of the faith that fueled her determination to survive. “Anyone who suggests that I became a victim of Stockholm syndrome by developing any feelings of sympathy for my captors simply has no idea what was going on inside my head,” she writes. “I never once—not for a single moment—developed a shred of affection or empathy for either of them….The only thing there ever was was fear.”
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered rather than how she recovered.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04015-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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