A gripping legal thriller pitting a cheating husband against a cheating wife.
A sordid divorce case leads to violence and an explosive courtroom trial.
The latest Florida-based legal thriller by Mills (The Objector, 2016, etc.) begins with a confrontation all too familiar in the litigious 21st century: an acrimonious divorce. Dr. Stan Jacoby makes an unexpected return home from a golfing vacation to surprise his wife of seven years, Karen, with an expensive gift. Relations have been tense between them lately, since Karen discovered affairs Stan had been carrying on. Turnabout becomes fair play: when he gets back home, he walks in on her in flagrante delicto with another man. Mutually incensed, they proceed to court, where Karen is represented by divorce attorney Beth Mancini, who quickly comes to enjoy her client’s tart tongue and friendly nature. When Beth asks Karen what traits she desires in her next husband, she replies: “I want him to be closer to my age. He doesn’t need to be as rich as Stan, but I still want financial security. And most importantly, he can’t be an asshole, like Stan.” The two take a break from legal tensions at Karen’s beach cottage, where they’re confronted by an armed, masked attacker they naturally assume is Stan. In the resulting criminal trial, long-suppressed secrets from both sides of the aisle get dragged into the open. As in his previous novel, Mills effectively moves his plot along—this is a genuine page-turner despite sometimes-pedestrian writing on the line-by-line level. Two of the tale’s atmospheric staples, the Florida setting and the give-and-take of a courtroom, are confidently, vividly realized throughout. Mills is especially adept at capturing a sense of place, no mean feat even in a state as oft-chronicled as Florida. The natural, unforced picture he paints of the sometimes-spiky, uneven friendship between Karen and Beth is the most memorably written strand of the story and makes the tense, final-act revelations and plot twists feel grounded. The climactic courtroom sequences are well-served by the author’s experience in the Florida legal world; they not only feel entirely believable, but crackle with dramatic energy as well. The tricks of those scenes—unexpected rulings from the bench, surprise revelations on the witness stand, etc.—should be familiar to any reader who’s seen a Law & Order repeat on TV, but Mills makes them his own.
A gripping legal thriller pitting a cheating husband against a cheating wife.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5194-0439-8
Page Count: 422
Publisher: Pono Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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