If only the fireworks which Scottoline (Devil’s Corner, 2005, etc.) uses to extricate her feisty heroine from her problems...
Judges who live in glass houses shouldn’t mouth off, as the latest of Scottoline’s Philadelphia legal eagles learns when her public and private lives collide with a bang.
The Honorable Cate Fante is the golden girl of the Eastern District bench, appointed at 39 to one of the most prestigious positions in the American bar. But not even her sharp mind can figure out a way to keep powerful TV producer Art Simone from evading Philadelphia lawyer Richard Marz’s clearly meritorious claim that his one-time buddy stole the idea and the leading characters for the wildly successful series Attorneys at Law from Marz. Cate reluctantly decides the case in favor of Simone. But the stern lecture she delivers to the defendant from the bench, which inspires Marz to hurl abuse at him in open court, is a distinct faux pas, as Chief Judge Sherman informs her privately. Actually, it’s a hundred times worse. Within two days Simone and Marz are both dead, the first a murder, the second an apparent suicide. As if the resulting notoriety weren’t punishment enough, Marz’s friend and partner, Detective Frank Russo, threatens to go public with details of Cate’s compulsive sexual interludes with lowlife pickups, the latest of whom is also dead. Even worse, Simone’s death evidently won’t prevent his production company from launching Judges at Court, a new series based on Cate’s life, featuring thinly fictionalized versions of not only the besmirched judge but her publicity-shy best friend Gina Katsakis and her autistic son Warren. Can she sue the company to prevent her private life from turning into prime-time drama? Probably not—but if she doesn’t, her days as a judge will be numbered.
If only the fireworks which Scottoline (Devil’s Corner, 2005, etc.) uses to extricate her feisty heroine from her problems were as compelling or believable as the sure-footed mastery with which she plunges her into hot water.Pub Date: March 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074290-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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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