If she were real, Winer's heroine would be your hands-down first choice if you got in trouble. But as a lucky and hopefully...
A seasoned criminal defense attorney must draw on her experience to save a teenage client who doesn’t want to be saved.
Over decades, Lee Isaacs has become one of Boulder’s top criminal defense attorneys, but lately she has a lot on her mind besides work. She’s about to turn 60, a number that gives her pause even though decades of taekwondo have kept her fit, if frequently bruised. She worries about her 84-year-old father. She misses her husband, Paul, who died five years ago. So when a woman begs Lee to defend her nephew Jeremy, Lee is initially reluctant. The 16-year-old is accused of—and confessed to—being part of a group of skinheads who stomped to death another young man when they found out he was gay. But as Lee gets information from her determined investigator, Carla, and then eventually from Jeremy, she thinks there may be a way to save Jeremy. Winer (The Furthest City Light, 2012), who was a criminal defense attorney for decades, brings vivid, insider knowledge of all things legal, from lawyers’ black humor to the importance of details to a jury. Unlike many dull legal novels, though, this is filled with witty dialogue, believable characters, and quick pacing (it's a sure bet that the author never bored a jury). Lee is complex, funny, grouchy, and ambitious. It’s just plain fun to hang out with her and her two gay friends; it’s fun to listen as she and her dad talk late at night. And it’s seriously impressive to watch her as a lawyer.
If she were real, Winer's heroine would be your hands-down first choice if you got in trouble. But as a lucky and hopefully law-abiding reader, you have the right to buy her next adventure and remain silent for hours as you speed through the pages.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61088-228-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bancroft Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
A fable about the consolatory and strengthening powers of religion flounders about somewhere inside this unconventional coming-of-age tale, which was shortlisted for Canada’s Governor General’s Award. The story is told in retrospect by Piscine Molitor Patel (named for a swimming pool, thereafter fortuitously nicknamed “Pi”), years after he was shipwrecked when his parents, who owned a zoo in India, were attempting to emigrate, with their menagerie, to Canada. During 227 days at sea spent in a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger (mostly with the latter, which had efficiently slaughtered its fellow beasts), Pi found serenity and courage in his faith: a frequently reiterated amalgam of Muslim, Hindu, and Christian beliefs. The story of his later life, education, and mission rounds out, but does not improve upon, the alternately suspenseful and whimsical account of Pi’s ordeal at sea—which offers the best reason for reading this otherwise preachy and somewhat redundant story of his Life.
Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100811-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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