A glamorpuss lawyer whose behavior defies belief; gay bars and hooker disguises; a little detection, a little courtroom...
The newest member of Philadelphia’s ladies-only law firm of Rosato & Associates (The Vendetta Defense, 2001, etc.) lands a once-in-a-lifetime case: investigating her own murder.
Using Scottoline’s trademark razzle-dazzle tactics, Anne Murphy—who honors “precision . . . in the law, brain surgery, and lipliner”—has just succeeded in getting the judge to exclude a crucial witness against Gil Martin, the dot-com millionaire client she’s defending in a sexual-harassment case, when the legal machinery grinds to a halt for the 4th of July weekend. Flush with success, Anne has nobody to celebrate it with. She’s new to the East Coast, long estranged from her alcoholic actress mother, and wary about seeing men ever since her first date with LA erotomaniac Kevin Satorno turned him into a stalker now doing hard time. Deciding on a whim to leave town for the weekend, she’s happy to accept her artist acquaintance Willa Hansen’s offer to house-sit her cat. Next morning, though, her holiday ends when she reads a headline announcing her own murder. Clearly, Willa’s been shotgunned to death in her place—and it’s no mystery by whom, since a phone call confirms that Kevin has indeed just escaped from prison. Figuring that reporting their little mistake to the authorities would put her back at the top of Kevin’s hit list, Anne resolves to stay underground. But things don’t exactly work out that way. She’s forced to reveal herself first to Rosato & Associates; then to Matt Booker, the plaintiff’s attorney who’s been making puppy-dog eyes at her across the aisle; then to Philadelphia’s finest; and finally, at the height of Independence Day festivities, to Kevin himself.
A glamorpuss lawyer whose behavior defies belief; gay bars and hooker disguises; a little detection, a little courtroom drama, and one noisy finale: it’s all as fleet and breathless as it is synthetic.Pub Date: May 21, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-018514-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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