A Kafkaesque political drama as allegory for America’s blind quest for absolute safety from international terrorism while...
In Roosevelt’s (In the Shadow of the Law, 2005) latest, the Axis attacks, and newly minted attorney Cash Harrison learns that too many powerful people think the " Constitution just a scrap of paper."
With a world war raging, many Americans believe it's justified to confine Japanese-Americans to detention camps: "The interests of the individual must be weighed against the needs of national security." Harrison is from an old Main Line Philadelphia family, sufficiently acquainted with the right people—people who might say about an artist that he "made Christ look too Jewish"—to be unknowingly classified 4-F and then offered a slot as a Supreme Court clerk. Harrison finds that it's the clerks' job to read the many petitions for certiorari and help the justices decide which cases to hear. And it’s not long before he believes his fellow clerk Gene Gressman is right in suspecting someone is "manipulating the court" via the clerks. Then Gressman’s found dead, his frail heart blamed, and Harrison is afraid he was killed because of the internment cases. He wants to find the truth and so asks Attorney General Francis Biddle, another Main Line denizen, for work at the Alien Enemies Control Unit. The plot is a Russian matryoshka, layered and deceptive. The decision to intern Japanese-Americans, "made in good faith for the safety of the nation," could be linked to profits made by "acquiring Japanese land." Historical characters such as Biddle, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and justices Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter arrive on the page arrogant, patronizing, and elitist, making for a depressing (and perhaps overly long) tale lightened only by Harrison finding honor, and love, in a San Francisco court hearing.
A Kafkaesque political drama as allegory for America’s blind quest for absolute safety from international terrorism while "the interests of capital" profit from paranoia.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941393-30-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Regan Arts
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...
Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.
Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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