Not groundbreaking, but plenty entertaining.
After flaming out at a prestigious firm, a young lawyer does penance in the public-defenders office, learning quickly and sharply about the legal system of the streets in a fast-moving debut thriller.
Joel Deveraux’s smarts took him on an uninterrupted track from a modest family and educational background through Columbia Law to a white-shoe firm. Then his smooth upward glide was interrupted by a relationship with Beth, a young paralegal who turned him on to heroin, providing blissful escape from a mind-numbing billable life as an associate. Beth won the undeclared race to see who could crash and burn quicker, dying of an overdose in the ladies room and leaving Joel to limp away from the firm and sit out a six-month suspension of his license. He got away light. Beth’s rich, vengeful father did his best to have the young lawyer disbarred for life. At the end of his suspension he goes to work for the public-defenders office at the bottom of the ladder, handling the arraignments of the bottom of New York’s criminal food chain. His luck changes when his supervisor assigns him to work a murder case under smart, prickly Myra Goldstein. Joel, who’s more likable than he thinks, scrambles to prove himself useful to Myra, who hadn’t seen the need for any help, thank you. Their defendant is an amiable black drug dealer who seemingly had nothing to gain from shooting a guy who owed him money, accidentally doing in a white bystander in the area. But the wounded victim’s girlfriend swears she saw him pull the trigger. Myra and Joel do the investigative work that the police neglected, discovering that the bystander was not so innocent, and that there was hanky-panky with the police work on the identification. The two lawyers build a case and a relationship, the case goes to trial and, with some hair-raising turns, justice reigns.
Not groundbreaking, but plenty entertaining.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52580-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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