A generally impressive first outing from a talented writer.
A Texas patent lawyer gets embroiled in a murder trial in this debut novel.
The small city of Marshall, in eastern Texas, has for years been a favored venue for intellectual-property trials, the kind of cases in which the narrator, lawyer James Euchre, has thrived. In the book’s well-paced opening, Euchre is retained for a new patent lawsuit, his client has a violent in-court episode after an adverse ruling by a judge who’s been Euchre’s mentor, and police arrest the client after the judge is murdered. Euchre is the genre’s typically troubled, brooding quasi-underdog, a heavy drinker overshadowed by a famous lawyer father and struggling with his first murder trial. In this area he gets help and a little romance from one of the book’s rare women, a former prosecuting attorney. For welcome glints of humor, there’s Euchre’s investigator, a wisecracking gay woman known as The Leg for her place-kicking prowess. For trademark humor, intellectual-property lawyers lunch at a place called Central Perks, recalling the Friends coffee shop. Hartstone, who has written screenplays for film (Shock and Awe) and TV (The Good Fight), displays a sure hand with the pointed adversarial dialogue that fuels legal thrillers. He builds a nice level of tension in Euchre’s efforts to cope with an abrasive, evasive client and in the lawyer’s legal missteps and local feuds, even combining the two when Euchre goes after a man who once dated his wife. The courtroom scenes have some standout moments, but much of the action is elsewhere, in the Euchre team’s detective work. Through all this, Hartstone weaves two themes, of which one, about small towns and their secrets, was well worn in Harper Lee’s time and doesn’t add much heft here. The other concerns fathers and sons, which Hartstone sustains well through several relevant variations.
A generally impressive first outing from a talented writer.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54781-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
A weird, wild ride.
Celebrity scandal and a haunted lake drive the narrative in this bestselling author’s latest serving of subtly ironic suspense.
Sager’s debut, Final Girls (2017), was fun and beautifully crafted. His most recent novels—Home Before Dark (2020) and Survive the Night (2021) —have been fun and a bit rickety. His new novel fits that mold. Narrator Casey Fletcher grew up watching her mother dazzle audiences, and then she became an actor herself. While she never achieves the “America’s sweetheart” status her mother enjoyed, Casey makes a career out of bit parts in movies and on TV and meatier parts onstage. Then the death of her husband sends her into an alcoholic spiral that ends with her getting fired from a Broadway play. When paparazzi document her substance abuse, her mother exiles her to the family retreat in Vermont. Casey has a dry, droll perspective that persists until circumstances overwhelm her, and if you’re getting a Carrie Fisher vibe from Casey Fletcher, that is almost certainly not an accident. Once in Vermont, she passes the time drinking bourbon and watching the former supermodel and the tech mogul who live across the lake through a pair of binoculars. Casey befriends Katherine Royce after rescuing her when she almost drowns and soon concludes that all is not well in Katherine and Tom’s marriage. Then Katherine disappears….It would be unfair to say too much about what happens next, but creepy coincidences start piling up, and eventually, Casey has to face the possibility that maybe some of the eerie legends about Lake Greene might have some truth to them. Sager certainly delivers a lot of twists, and he ventures into what is, for him, new territory. Are there some things that don’t quite add up at the end? Maybe, but asking that question does nothing but spoil a highly entertaining read.
A weird, wild ride.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18319-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.
The ne’er-do-well son of a successful Irish American family gets dragged into criminal complications that suggest the rest of the Devlins aren’t exactly the upstanding citizens they appear.
The first 35 years in the life of Thomas “TJ” Devlin have been one disappointment after another to his parents, lawyers who founded a prosperous insurance and reinsurance firm, and his more successful siblings, John and Gabby. A longtime alcoholic who’s been unemployable ever since he did time for an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Carrie’s then 2-year-old daughter, TJ is nominally an investigator for Devlin & Devlin, but everyone knows the post is a sinecure. Things change dramatically when golden-boy John tells TJ that he just killed Neil Lemaire, an accountant for D&D client Runstan Electronics. Their speedy return to the murder scene reveals no corpse, so the brothers breathe easier—until Lemaire turns up shot to death in his car. John’s way of avoiding anything that might jeopardize his status as heir apparent to D&D is to throw TJ under the bus, blaming him for everything John himself has done and adding that you can’t trust anything his brother has said since he’s fallen off the wagon. TJ, who’s maintained his sobriety a day at a time for nearly two years, feels outraged, but neither the police investigating the murder nor his nearest and dearest care about his feelings. Forget the forgettable mystery, whose solution will leave you shrugging instead of gasping, and focus on the circular firing squad of the Devlins, and you’ll have a much better time than TJ.
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780525539704
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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