A slow-starting legal thriller that later shows its teeth with fierce courtroom drama.
In Thompson’s (Dead Peasants, 2013, etc.) new legal thriller, an attorney works his first criminal case, defending his mentally ill brother against murder charges.
After Debbie Robinson is attacked and killed on her morning jog, police quickly a pinpoint a suspect: Dan Little, a paranoid schizophrenic who ran away from the scene of the crime. The cops think they’ve got their man, since he was found with Debbie’s braceletand her blood on his sneaker. But Dan’s half brother, Wayne, a lawyer who specializes in civil cases, believes that Dan is innocent. A plea of insanity seems like the best option, but that’s not so easy to prove in a Texas court, and Wayne has his work cut out for him: Dan’s latest experimental medications make him seem uncharacteristically lucid, and Wayne’s expert witness may be hitting the bottle too hard. The assistant district attorney, meanwhile, has her own expert: Dr. Frederick Parke, a forensic psychiatrist, who’s secretly the perpetrator of the crime. Meanwhile, Wayne’s friend and love interest, Rita, a computer tech and former private investigator, looks into a pattern of murders of female joggers, hoping to exonerate Dan by exposing a serial killer. Thompson’s novel initially feels slow-paced, as it follows the terrifying assault on Debbie with a significant amount of back story about the Littles, Rita and Dr. Parke. However, this section effectively establishes the subsequent story, which reveals Parke’s twisted mentality (he’s murdering people as part of a personal study on serial killing). There’s also a surprisingly understated romance between Wayne and Rita which develops as the story progresses. The author does diminish the suspense by divulging the murderer’s identity and making readers confident of Dan’s innocence so early; it also somewhat lessens the impact of the showdown between Wayne and Parke when the scientist is finally called to testify on the stand. However, the courtroom scenes often soar; they’re intoxicating when Wayne pokes holes in the prosecutors’ case and nail-biting when the assistant district attorney tears apart the defense’s witnesses.
A slow-starting legal thriller that later shows its teeth with fierce courtroom drama.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9897154-7-8
Page Count: 279
Publisher: Story Merchant Press
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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