An often engaging mystery-series starter.
A man who’s unlucky in love finds himself trapped inside the legal system in Millhollin’s (Forever Bound, 2017, etc.) latest thriller.
Millhollin has drawn on his four decades as a practicing attorney and his knowledge of his retirement city of Nashville in several of his legal thrillers. At the center of his latest is a new character, veteran private investigator Barrett Armstrong, who starts dating Layla Adams, the secretary to Charles Whitmore, the assistant district attorney for Davidson County. In a short time, however, Layla cools on Barrett without explanation and publicly breaks up with him. As a result, he becomes the obvious suspect when Layla is found brutally murdered. Whitmore indicts Barrett and stops seeking any other potential suspects—in part because Whitmore’s drug-abusing son, Michael, had attempted to run Layla down. Barrett has two people on his side: John Weatherly, his longtime best friend and lawyer; and Kris Thompson, another PI who hopes to partner with Barrett after the trial. However, John puts up a lukewarm defense, leaving it to Kris to save Barrett from prison. The strength of Millhollin’s novel is his intricate knowledge of the legal system—particularly when he examines what happens when best practices are ignored for the falsely accused. The sturdy narrative has a stop-and-go pacing that reflects that of real-life court systems, and the author reveals how a defendant without an alibi, such as Barrett, can be convicted on merely circumstantial evidence. The novel’s main flaw, however, is that its protagonist becomes a weaker and less interesting character as the narrative progresses, to the degree that readers may wonder why Kris is working so hard to prove his innocence. Still, Barrett and Kris do exhibit good chemistry after she drags him out of his jail-induced funk. After dropping a red herring regarding the identity of the killer, Millhollin pulls off a twisty, satisfying ending.
An often engaging mystery-series starter.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 329
Publisher: Fulton Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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