Lescroart cuts back on his trademark sociological sweep to deliver the mid-grade pleasures of the genre: a slow start,...
The author’s latest legal thriller assigns a starring role to Gina Roake, yet another in his ever-expanding corps of regulars from the San Francisco justice system.
Even though she’d just told him she wanted a divorce, and even though he told a traffic cop who tagged him for speeding that he was leaving town so that he wouldn’t kill his wife, nature writer Stuart Gorman can’t understand why the police regard him as their prime suspect after she’s found drowned in their hot tub. It’s true that Stuart is the person who found her the next morning, pulled her out and tried to administer CPR to a corpse already stiff with rigor mortis. And it’s true that Dr. Caryn Dryden’s death makes him a multi-millionaire. But he couldn’t possibly have killed Caryn, he points out, because he was up at Tamarack Lake when she died. In that case, Insp. Sgt. Devin Juhle wants to know, how could a neighbor have identified Stuart’s SUV pulling into his garage at 11:30 p.m. and leaving again an hour later? It must be a mistake, replies the suspect, who doesn’t even want to retain counsel because he’s convinced that the best way to clear himself is to play detective. Not until his old college roommate, California Assemblyman Jedd Conley, persuades him that hiring an attorney is no admission of guilt, does he sign on Gina, a partner of franchise linchpin Dismas Hardy (The Second Chair, 2004, etc.). Gina, a former prosecutor, has never defended a murder case before, and apart from the weight of the evidence, Stuart gives every sign of being the most clueless client in history.
Lescroart cuts back on his trademark sociological sweep to deliver the mid-grade pleasures of the genre: a slow start, realistically repetitious interrogations, some crackling courtroom scenes and a surprise ending that will catch at least half his readers unawares.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2007
ISBN: 0-525-94998-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying...
King (Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations.
Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn’t Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here (“For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy”), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom—don’t ask why there—and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: “I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.” A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed—or maybe not. King’s vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been—that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we’re all actually living. “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to,” warns King in an afterword, “look at the Zapruder film.”
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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