Fans—and Grisham has endless numbers of them—will be pleased.
The prolific Grisham (The Reckoning, 2018, etc.) turns in another skillfully told procedural.
Pay attention to the clerical collar that Cullen Post occasionally dons in Grisham’s latest legal thriller. Post comes by the garb honestly, being both priest and investigative lawyer, his Guardian Ministries devoted to freeing inmates who have been wrongly imprisoned. Says an adversary at the start of the book, learning that his conviction is about to be overturned, “Is this a joke, Post?” Post replies: “Oh sure. Nothing but laughs over here on death row.” Aided by an Atlantan whom he sprang from the slam earlier, Post turns his energies to trying to do the same for Quincy Miller, a black man imprisoned for the murder of a white Florida lawyer who “had been shot twice in the head with a 12-gauge shotgun, and there wasn’t much left of his face.” It’s to such icky details that Post’s meticulous mind turns: Why a shotgun and not a pistol, as most break-ins involve? Who would have done such a thing—surely not the guy's wife, and surely not for a measly $2 million in life insurance? As Grisham strews the path with red herrings, Post, though warned off by a smart forensic scientist, begins to sniff out clues that point to a culprit closer to the courtroom bench than the sandy back roads of rural Florida. Grisham populates his yarn with occasionally goofy details—a prosecuting attorney wants Post disbarred “for borrowing a pubic hair” from the evidence in a case—but his message is constant throughout: The “innocent people rotting away in prison” whom Post champions are there because they are black and brown, put there by mostly white jurors, and the real perp “knew that a black guy in a white town would be much easier to convict.” The tale is long and sometimes plods, especially in its courtroom scenes, but it has a satisfying payoff—and look out for that collar at the end.
Fans—and Grisham has endless numbers of them—will be pleased.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54418-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
An unusual, cleverly constructed thriller that is also a deep dive into the culture of a place many Americans have probably...
A year in the lives of women and girls on an isolated peninsula in northeastern Russia opens with a chilling crime.
In the first chapter of Phillips' immersive, impressive, and strikingly original debut, we meet sisters Alyona and Sophia, ages 11 and 8, amusing themselves one August afternoon on the rocky shoreline of a public beach on the waterfront of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city on Russia's remote Kamchatka peninsula. They are offered a ride home by a seemingly kind stranger. After he drives right past the intersection that leads to the apartment they share with their mother, they disappear from their previous lives and, to a large extent, from the narrative. The rest of the book is a series of linked stories about a number of different women on the peninsula, all with the shadow of the missing girls hanging over them as a year goes by since their disappearance. Another young girl with a single mom loses her best friend to new restrictions imposed by the other girl's anxious mother. The daughter of a reindeer herder from the north, at college in the city, finds her controlling boyfriend clamping down harder than ever. In a provincial town, members of a family whose teenage daughter disappeared four years earlier are troubled by the similarities and differences between their case and this one. The book opens with both a character list and a map—you'll be looking at both often as you find your footing and submerge ever more deeply in this world, which is both so different from and so much like our own. As the connections between the stories pile up and tighten, you start to worry—will we ever get closure about the girls? Yes, we will. And you'll want to start over and read it again, once you know.
An unusual, cleverly constructed thriller that is also a deep dive into the culture of a place many Americans have probably never heard of, illuminating issues of race, culture, sexual attraction, and the transition from the U.S.S.R. to post-Soviet Russia.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-52041-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Readers will love the quirky characters in this clever yarn. Pendergast and Coldmoon make an excellent pair.
The 18th installment in the Pendergast series by Preston and Child (City of Endless Night, 2018, etc.) gives the hero a partner in the hunt for a strange killer.
A woman walks a dog in a Miami Beach cemetery, and her dog finds a human heart. Soon more hearts turn up at the gravesites of women thought to have committed suicide a decade before. The FBI assigns agents Pendergast and Coldmoon to work with the Miami PD on the case. Pendergast is highly successful in closing cases on his own but “was about as rogue as they came,” and suspects tend not to survive his investigations. Agent Coldmoon’s secret assignment is to keep a close eye on his partner, “a bomb waiting to go off,” who tends to do something “out of left field, or of questionable ethics, or even specifically against orders.” The current victims are women whose throats have been slit and breastbones split open to remove their hearts, all in quick and expert fashion. The killer leaves notes at the graves, signed “Mister Brokenhearts.” This kind of weirdness is in Pendergast’s wheelhouse, as he’s an odd sort himself, quite outside the FBI culture. Rather like Sherlock Holmes, he sees patterns that others miss. He’s tall, gaunt, dresses like an undertaker, and always seems to have more money than the average FBI agent. Both men are great characters—Coldmoon curses in Lakota and prefers “tarry black” coffee that Pendergast likens to “poison sumac” and “battery acid.” They wonder about the earlier deaths and whether the women had really hanged themselves. For answers they require exhumations, new autopsies, and a medical examiner’s close examinations of the hyoid bones. Meanwhile the deeply troubled killer ponders his next action, which he hopes will one day wipe away his pain and guilt and bring atonement. Alligators, bullets, and a sinkhole contribute to a nerve-wracking finish.
Readers will love the quirky characters in this clever yarn. Pendergast and Coldmoon make an excellent pair.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5387-4720-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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