A female-forward courtroom drama with bit parts for a few lucky guys.
A desperate housewife relies on a young attorney’s skills to save her from disaster.
Kira Grant loves her pockets of power. As president of the Garden Club, she can make sure that her turn to host falls in the highly prized late spring months, when her hydrangea border is at its peak. As president of the Wolf Run Elementary School PTA, she can insist that her son, Finn, be honored as one of the two students to earn straight A’s from first through fifth grades. So when Kira is arrested for attempted murder after handing a poisoned smoothie to fellow PTA board member Summer Peerman at the fifth grade graduation party, the prospect of a long prison term isn’t her biggest worry. Being bounced off her boards and, worse, being barred from the school, is. Kira hires young defense attorney Allison Barton to plead her case. She thinks that as the mother of a kindergartener, Allison will empathize with the painful prospect of losing daily contact with her children’s teachers. And if Allison gets out of line, Kira can always ask her senior partner, Dan MacDonald, forever a sucker for a peek of cleavage, to intervene. For the most part, Allison, who burns with a hard and gemlike flame, gives the client her all, although she disagrees with Kira’s desire to cast the suspicion of racism—since Summer is biracial—on a fellow PTA board member as a motive for the attack. In alternating chapters, Wright contrasts conniving Kira with conscientious Allison, leaving the reader to wonder what a legal victory would even look like.
A female-forward courtroom drama with bit parts for a few lucky guys.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2634-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Slow moving and richly layered.
A retired cop takes one last case in this stand-alone novel from the creator of the Dublin Murder Squad.
Originally from North Carolina, Cal Hooper has spent the last 30 years in Chicago. “A small place. A small town in a small country”: That’s what he’s searching for when he moves to the West of Ireland. His daughter is grown, his wife has left him, so Cal is on his own—until a kid named Trey starts hanging around. Trey’s brother is missing. Everyone believes that Brendan has run off just like his father did, but Trey thinks there’s more to the story than just another young man leaving his family behind in search of money and excitement in the city. Trey wants the police detective who just emigrated from America to find out what’s really happened to Brendan. French is deploying a well-worn trope here—in fact, she’s deploying a few. Cal is a new arrival to an insular community, and he’s about to discover that he didn’t leave crime and violence behind when he left the big city. Cal is a complex enough character, though, and it turns out that the mystery he’s trying to solve is less shocking than what he ultimately discovers. French's latest is neither fast-paced nor action-packed, and it has as much to do with Cal’s inner life as it does with finding Brendan. Much of what mystery readers are looking for in terms of action is squeezed into the last third of the novel, and the morally ambiguous ending may be unsatisfying for some. But French’s fans have surely come to expect imperfect allegiance to genre conventions, and the author does, ultimately, deliver plenty of twists, shocking revelations, and truly chilling moments.
Slow moving and richly layered.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-73-522465-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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