An engaging Mafia story spiked with some surprises.
An ambitious prosecutor and a newbie mob attorney face off in this debut legal thriller.
After three years working as a lawyer in the Palm Beach County Public Defender’s Office in Florida, 29-year-old Jason Noble is burned out. “Being an assistant public defender is like working in dog years,” he tells his boss. And Jason knows a lot about canines, as his English bulldog, Caesar, is his constant companion at home and on business-related road trips. After Jason opens his own law practice, business is initially slow. But things heat up after mobster Antonio “Magic Man”Barrera, charged with three counts of murder, is advised by one of “the best lawyers in the country” that it’s an unwinnable case. The lawyer, Peter “the Great” Cohen, suggests hiring an inexperienced former public defender so “Ineffective Assistance of Counsel” can ultimately be proved. Enter Jason, who will spar with prosecutor Trevor Wittingham, a gubernatorial candidate running in a special election. Wittingham believes the conviction of a reputed mob boss will ensure his ascent “to the governor’s mansion,” so he’s willing to do whatever it takes to win the case. In Morse’s story, verbal and physical cruelty—a wife continually berating her husband; trafficked victims suffering before being killed; a mobster getting mutilated before being thrown to the gators—piles on to the point of diminishing returns. Mobspeak—including terms such as “fuhgeddaboudit”—lifted from B gangster films sounds clichéd. Nicknames are overused—to name a few: Vinnie “The Bag” Respi, Mario “Lug Nut” Rizzo, and attorney Tim “Butt-Kisser” Barnes.There’s nothing woke about the female characters: sex workers, crabby wives, and “doe-eyed” stunners. But courtroom scenes read authentically, and the author knows the South Florida area, citing, for example, “The Chart Room, where Truman Capote penned his final novel and Jimmy Buffett and Bob Marley played their first gigs.” A courtroom reveal and an unexpected ending are more than satisfying.
An engaging Mafia story spiked with some surprises.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For fans whose pulses quicken when they hear that “the very future of British racing was at risk.”
Life once more challenges Sid Halley, ex-jockey and ex-investigator, to turn lemons into lemonade.
You’d think that replacing his prosthetic left hand with a transplanted hand would be great for Sid, but its main consequence is the announcement by his wife, cancer researcher Marina, that she’s so freaked out by the new limb that she’s leaving him—or at least that she’s taking their 9-year-old daughter with her to Holland to care for her dying father and has no particular plans to return. In her absence, the always-moody Sid has nothing better to do than take up arms on behalf of Gary Bremner, a Yorkshire trainer and former jockey whose horse caused the damage to Sid’s hand during a race years ago. Gary is afraid that his stable will be targeted by a mysterious jockeys’ agent who’s not only found more and more creative ways to grab a piece of any transactions between trainers and the jockeys they hire, but who’s begun to dictate which favorites must lose which races. Gary’s absolutely right that defying the trainer, whom he eventually identifies as the sinister Anton Valance, is bad business. Though he miraculously escapes the barn fire that claims three of his horses, he doesn’t escape getting hanged from a tree, providing a news flash to DCI Williams, who’d assumed that Gary had died in that fire. The longer Sid spends poking into the jump-racing world of trainers and jockeys and horses he’s repeatedly tried to walk away from, the more convinced he becomes that Valance has a partner, and identifying that partner becomes his obsession. The inflated but routine mystery accordingly gets less and less mysterious as it goes along, but the horse-racing dope is as fascinating as ever.
For fans whose pulses quicken when they hear that “the very future of British racing was at risk.”Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63910-294-5
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
This thriller is taut and fast-paced but lacks compelling protagonists.
Three siblings who have been out of touch for more than 20 years grapple with their unsettling childhoods, but when the youngest inherits the family home, all are drawn back together.
At the age of 25, Libby Jones learns she has inherited a large London house that was held in a trust left to her by her birthparents. When she visits the lawyer, she is shocked to find out that she was put up for adoption when she was 10 months old after her parents died in the house in an apparent suicide pact with an unidentified man and that she has an older brother and sister who were teenagers at the time of their parents' deaths and haven't been seen since. Meanwhile, in alternating narratives, we're introduced to Libby's sister, Lucy Lamb, who's on the verge of homelessness with her two children in the south of France, and her brother, Henry Lamb, who's attempting to recall the last few disturbing years with his parents during which they lost their wealth and were manipulated into letting friends move into their home. These friends included the controlling but charismatic David Thomsen, who moved his own wife and two children into the rooms upstairs. Henry also remembers his painful adolescent confusion as he became wildly infatuated with Phineas, David’s teenage son. Meanwhile, Libby connects with Miller Roe, the journalist who covered the story about her family, and the pair work together to find her brother and sister, determine what happened when she was an infant, and uncover who has recently been staying in the vacant house waiting for Libby to return. As Jewell (Watching You, 2018, etc.) moves back and forth from the past to the present, the narratives move swiftly toward convergence in her signature style, yet with the exception of Lucy’s story, little suspense is built up and the twists can’t quite make up for the lack of deep characters and emotionally weighty moments.
This thriller is taut and fast-paced but lacks compelling protagonists.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9010-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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