A crushingly relevant story that puts its readers in the shoes of the accused.
A Black teenager is wrongfully accused of murder in Delegal’s novel.
Fifteen-year-old Jason Royals is given a rare opportunity by his mother—the chance to skip church on Sunday to prepare for a job interview at a local Beau Rêve, Florida, pharmacy with his new crush, Kim. Dressed in nice khakis and with an added spring in his step from his air-bounce sneakers, Jason rushes across the street to beat traffic only to be stopped and forcibly arrested for “running while Black.” He shortly finds himself in the custody of John Marshall, a 10-year veteran of the police force anxious to end his tenure in homicide. Pressured by his role as an “upstanding” Black man, haunted by too much violence committed by too many young offenders, Marshall has no trouble believing that the high school student before him is a murderer. Worse, after a threatening trip into the woods with Marshall and his white partner, the traumatized Jason confesses to the crime. His only hope in a system stacked against him is that his attorney, Aaron Hampton, known as a “fierce advocate,” can get his confession dismissed and ensure that his time in jail only means a future delayed, not one denied. This timely novel is a vivid panic attack on the page, a fictional account of the real-life horror story too many young Black men face every day. Inspired by an actual crime in Jacksonville, Jason’s plight illustrates how rushed, abusive police work and racism override justice at every turn. Correcting such mistakes is a long, frustrating process, and the book places readers right there, in the cell and courtroom alongside its protagonist, to struggle with him and feel his anger, hopelessness, and sorely tested faith. The narrative excels at empathy and doesn’t only reserve it for Jason; Marshall isn’t portrayed as some stock serial villain, just another flawed character in an even more flawed system.
A crushingly relevant story that puts its readers in the shoes of the accused.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-0578953809
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
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