A sufficient legal mystery but the protagonist’s complicated love life steals the show.
An environmental lawyer works a case involving the deaths of two teenagers from mysterious chemicals in this debut thriller.
In Mike Jacobs’ few years at the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, his boss has assigned him lousy cases. Now he’s finally second-chairing something substantial: the sudden deaths of teens Peter Mason and Cindy Battaglia. The young couple swam in a river that’s evidently a dumping site for chemicals; phenol exposure is ultimately what proved fatal. As Mike searches for the culprit responsible for illegal dumping, his personal life gets significantly more complex. He begins casually dating two women: Sherry Stein, a deputy attorney general, and Patty Dixon, a nurse at the home where his sickly mother resides. Both relationships become more serious, and Mike struggles with his choice of committing to one and severing the other. Meanwhile, Mike receives a phone call warning him off his investigation and is completely unaware that a certain car is regularly following him. And with a gubernatorial election on the horizon, powerful individuals have their eyes on the unfolding case. The incumbent governor wants to use the tragedy against his opponent, District Attorney Gerald Sheehan, who’s cooking up his own sinister scheme. Burcat packs his story with enthralling subplots and characters. Mike, for example, has phone conversations with his rabbi brother concerning their mother, who has early-onset Alzheimer’s, and gets relationship advice from first chair Roger Alden. Likewise, the women are multidimensional: Sherry is investigating Sheehan’s possibly crooked campaign funds, and Patty is a single mom with an ex-boyfriend who won’t pay child support. They’re likable as well, making indecisive Mike a less than stellar protagonist who can’t even decide if his actions are honest or dishonest. Despite a solid setup and intelligent prose, the environmental-themed mystery gradually reaches a conclusion with little input from Mike. Readers may be more invested in the inevitable confrontation between Sherry and Patty, and in that regard, the story doesn’t disappoint.
A sufficient legal mystery but the protagonist’s complicated love life steals the show.Pub Date: May 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-946664-62-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Headline Books, Inc.
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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