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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A daring concept not so daringly developed.
In Kidd’s (The Invention of Wings, 2014, etc.) feminist take on the New Testament, Jesus has a wife whose fondest longing is to write.
Ana is the daughter of Matthias, head scribe to Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee. She demonstrates an exceptional aptitude for writing, and Matthias, for a time, indulges her with reed pens, papyri, and other 16 C.E. office supplies. Her mother disapproves, but her aunt, Yaltha, mentors Ana in the ways of the enlightened women of Alexandria, from whence Yaltha, suspected of murdering her brutal husband, was exiled years before. Yaltha was also forced to give up her daughter, Chaya, for adoption. As Ana reaches puberty, parental tolerance of her nonconformity wanes, outweighed by the imperative to marry her off. Her adopted brother, Judas—yes, that Judas—is soon disowned for his nonconformity—plotting against Antipas. On the very day Ana, age 14, meets her prospective betrothed, the repellent Nathanial, in the town market, she also encounters Jesus, a young tradesman, to whom she’s instantly drawn. Their connection deepens after she encounters Jesus in the cave where she is concealing her writings about oppressed women. When Nathanial dies after his betrothal to Ana but before their marriage, Ana is shunned for insufficiently mourning him—and after refusing to become Antipas’ concubine, she is about to be stoned until Jesus defuses the situation with that famous admonition. She marries Jesus and moves into his widowed mother’s humble compound in Nazareth, accompanied by Yaltha. There, poverty, not sexism, prohibits her from continuing her writing—office supplies are expensive. Kidd skirts the issue of miracles, portraying Jesus as a fully human and, for the period, accepting husband—after a stillbirth, he condones Ana’s practice of herbal birth control. A structural problem is posed when Jesus’ active ministry begins—what will Ana’s role be? Problem avoided when, notified by Judas that Antipas is seeking her arrest, she and Yaltha journey to Alexandria in search of Chaya. In addition to depriving her of the opportunity to write the first and only contemporaneous gospel, removing Ana from the main action destroys the novel’s momentum.
A daring concept not so daringly developed.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-42976-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
There are moments of literary experimentation worthy of Virginia Woolf here, but in the end, this reads more like notes for...
Scenes from a marriage, sometimes lyrical, sometimes philosophically rich, sometimes just puzzling.
If Rainer Maria Rilke had written a novel about marriage, it might look something like this: a series of paragraphs, seldom exceeding more than a dozen lines, sometimes without much apparent connection to the text on either side. The story is most European, too; says the narrator, “I spent my afternoons in a city park, pretending to read Horace. At dusk, people streamed out of the Métro and into the street. In Paris, even the subways are required to be beautiful.” Well, oui. The principal character is “the wife,” nameless but not faceless, who enters into a relationship and then marriage with all the brave hope attendant in the enterprise. Offill (Last Things, 1999, etc.) is fond of pointed apothegms (“Life equals structure plus activity”) and reflections in the place of actual action, but as the story progresses, it’s clear that events test that hope—to say nothing of hubby’s refusal at first to pull down a decent salary, so the young family finds itself “running low on money for diapers and beer and potato chips.” Material conditions improve, but that hope gets whittled away further with the years, leading to moments worthy of a postmodern version of Diary of a Mad Housewife: “The wife is reading Civilization and Its Discontents, but she keeps getting lost in the index.” The fragmented story, true though it may be to our splintered, too busy lives, is sometimes hard to follow, and at times, the writing is precious, even if we’re always pulled back into gritty reality: “I reach my hand into the murky water, fiddle with the drain. When I pull it back out, my hand is scummed with grease.”
There are moments of literary experimentation worthy of Virginia Woolf here, but in the end, this reads more like notes for a novel than a novel itself.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35081-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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