A convoluted and overlong second legal thriller from big-time, San Francisco-based trial lawyer Martel (Partners, 1988). Seth Cameron, a hard-charger and moneymaker, lands a position at a big San Francisco law firm, where senior partner Anthony Treadwell sees him as a threat and sets out to destroy him. Overworked and self-medicated (booze, uppers, and downers), Cameron is an easy target. Treadwell forces him take on the case of Elena Barton, who believes negligence was involved in her husband's death in the crash of an Air Force bomber. But Treadwell and Barton's father (a US senator with defense-industry ties) in fact want the case sandbagged. They bully Cameron to stall, he misses the deadline for filing her complaint, and Treadwell has his opening: He fires Cameron, who ends up at a small law firm, angry and unfulfilled. He gets a chance at redemption, though, when Barton convinces him to bring suit against the manufacturer of the plane's faulty canopy. Initially, Cameron believes that the Air Force is engaged in a cover-up, but he realizes that much more is at stake when two potentially damaging witnesses for his case are murdered and his own life is threatened. Up to this point, Martel's story has been workmanlike enough, if hardly sizzling, but it grinds to a halt with a long, numbing trial section. Treadwell is defending attorney for the canopy manufacturer, and soon after the proceedings start it's obvious that Cameron is in troublesome witnesses change their testimony, others reveal evidence damaging to his case. Cameron's strategy? He spends 50 pages bickering with Treadwell, baiting witnesses, and angering the judge. Somehow, he also finds time to discover a conspiracy involving Barton's father, an illegal holding company, and a renegade Air Force generalbut he's light-years behind the reader. Occasionally tense, but bombast and lawyerly histrionics can't compensate for the lack of a believable plot.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-89094-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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