Peacock writes compellingly about issues of class, identity and justice while still managing to keep the plot barreling...
An up-and-coming New York lawyer must simultaneously defend a powerful developer and a young man accused of murdering a security guard in Peacock’s second novel (A Cure For Night, 2008).
As a product of a biracial, working-class family in Detroit, Duncan Riley often finds himself ill at ease with his role as a rising star at Blake and Wolcott, a white-shoe law firm in Manhattan. But partner Steven Blake has taken Riley under his wing and put him to work on the team defending Roth Properties—a commercial real-estate development firm and one of Blake and Wolcott’s biggest clients—who need representation after a fatal accident at one of their construction sites. As a further show of confidence, Riley has been given some of the firm’s image-burnishing pro bono work: He’s defending Rafael Nazario, who, along with his grandmother, faces eviction at a Lower East Side housing project currently being redeveloped as mixed-income housing by Roth Properties. Just when things are going well for the Nazarios, young Rafael is charged with murdering the very security guard who got him in trouble in the first place. Although Riley doesn’t have experience as a trial lawyer, he decides to defend Rafael against the murder charge, only to find himself under pressure from above to talk his client into taking a plea deal. Riley is torn between his career and his belief in Rafael’s innocence, a dilemma further complicated by the attention he’s getting from Roth Properties heiress apparent Leah Roth. Meanwhile, Candace Snow, an investigative reporter at the New York Journal, takes an interest in the Nazario case as she digs deeper into the Roth family’s shady doings. Peacock, a former lawyer whose first novel drew comparisons to Scott Turow, brings this legal thriller—and especially the characters therein—to vivid life, portraying multimillionaires and project residents with skill. The prose is perfectly tuned, drawing the reader in without ever getting in the way.
Peacock writes compellingly about issues of class, identity and justice while still managing to keep the plot barreling irresistibly along.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-53106-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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
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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