Playwright-turned-novelist Stetson paints with broad strokes and bold polemic colors, raising provocative questions while...
A controversial African-American professor stands trial for the murder of a Klansman who eluded prosecution for past crimes.
Martin Matheson, nicknamed “Doctor Fine” by admirers, gains a high profile and sharpens racial tensions in Jackson, Mississippi, with his dramatic lectures about lynchings and related atrocities during the civil rights era, striking a visceral chord by showing graphic photos of the crimes. The professor stops short of recommending retribution, but gives the names of unpunished and for the most part unrepentant local perpetrators who are still alive. Matheson is a thorn in the side of Deputy District Attorney James Reynolds, an African-American who has made steady career progress despite discrimination through perseverance and hard work. Reynolds often finds himself in court facing old lion Todd Miller, a white liberal past his prime but still a strong defender of leftist causes in the South. The narrative shifts among these three perspectives as Matheson’s activities become more than academic when the alleged criminals identified in his lectures begin getting killed. Reynolds contemplates prosecuting the professor on some charge, but debate ensues about specific culpability. The DDA’s job is made easier when blood evidence connects Matheson to the murder of crotchety Earvin Cooper. The trial occupies the story’s second half, with Reynolds prosecuting and Miller defending Doctor Fine. As might be expected, Matheson takes a very active role in his case, but Miller is no slouch, rising to the high-profile occasion by playing shamelessly to the media and displaying the courtroom showmanship of his younger days. The circuslike atmosphere takes the greatest toll on Reynolds, who has never before been a target of the local black community. Matheson takes the stand in his own defense, providing more surprises.
Playwright-turned-novelist Stetson paints with broad strokes and bold polemic colors, raising provocative questions while keeping the plot on the move in the tradition of the best contemporary commercial fiction.Pub Date: July 27, 2004
ISBN: 0-446-52706-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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