Good thing Cornelia Jones is a practicing realist; there’s not much comfort in white-bread Westport, Oregon, for African-Americans like her. On the other hand, Westport happens to be home to the superb Oceanographic Center, and Jan Koto, the good-looking, sensitive Japanese-American with whom Neely cohabits, happens to be a superb oceanographer. And “whither Jan goes, there go I” is Neely’s primary operating principle. So two years ago she followed Jan from the San Francisco Police Department to the Taft County Sheriff’s Office in Westport. Now those good ol’ boys in the TCSO aren’t just casually racist/sexist, they go at it hammer and tongs. How Neely got herself hired by redneck Sheriff Giff Wills is a mystery to her—one never adequately explained to the reader, by the way. And how, on election day, she manages to dislodge the entrenched Giff by dint of write-in ballots (who from?) stretches credibility further. Moreover, having won the job, it seems Neely doesn’t actually want it. On e-day plus one, however, Jan is brutally murdered, and that changes everything. Neely knows she’s sheriff to stay—despite a balky staff, a spineless D.A., a neo-Nazi rabble, an imported hit-man, and assorted other baddies—at least long enough for Jan’s killer to be caught, for justice to be served, and for her to inch toward closure. Wren leaves her long-running Conan Flagg series (Wake Up, Darlin’ Corey, 1984, etc.) for a new and possibly worthier protagonist. But though Neely has winning ways, helter-skelter plotting hurts her debut.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-24223-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.
A historical novel explores the intersection of love and war in the life of Australian-born World War II heroine Nancy Grace Augusta Wake.
Lawhon’s (I Was Anastasia, 2018, etc.) carefully researched, lively historical novels tend to be founded on a strategic chronological gambit, whether it’s the suspenseful countdown to the landing of the Hindenberg or the tale of a Romanov princess told backward and forward at once. In her fourth novel, she splits the story of the amazing Nancy Wake, woman of many aliases, into two interwoven strands, both told in first-person present. One begins on Feb. 29th, 1944, when Wake, code-named Hélène by the British Special Operations Executive, parachutes into Vichy-controlled France to aid the troops of the Resistance, working with comrades “Hubert” and “Denden”—two of many vividly drawn supporting characters. “I wake just before dawn with a full bladder and the uncomfortable realization that I am surrounded on all sides by two hundred sex-starved Frenchmen,” she says. The second strand starts eight years earlier in Paris, where Wake is launching a career as a freelance journalist, covering early stories of the Nazi rise and learning to drink with the hardcore journos, her purse-pooch Picon in her lap. Though she claims the dog “will be the great love of [her] life,” she is about to meet the hunky Marseille-based industrialist Henri Fiocca, whose dashing courtship involves French 75 cocktails, unexpected appearances, and a drawn-out seduction. As always when going into battle, even the ones with guns and grenades, Nancy says “I wear my favorite armor…red lipstick.” Both strands offer plenty of fireworks and heroism as they converge to explain all. The author begs forgiveness in an informative afterword for all the drinking and swearing. Hey! No apologies necessary!
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54468-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
One wonders if Grisham weren’t sleeping through some of this as well. Whatever the case, one of his lesser cases.
Another by-the-numbers legal procedural, at once gritty and lethargic, by longtime practitioner Grisham (Gray Mountain, 2014, etc.).
“There are plenty of people who’d like to kill me right now,” grumbles Sebastian Rudd, the rogue lawyer in question. He carries a gun, works out of his car, and sleeps in a different hotel room every week, precisely because he runs up against so many bad guys who mean him harm. Some of them are cops. Why? Because Sebastian, though jaded and cynical, as literary lawyers are required to be, apparently still believes in justice, for which reason, accompanied by a bodyguard named Partner (“a hulking, heavily armed guy who wears black suits and takes me everywhere”), he finds himself in a podunk burg where a client is fighting for his life against the charge that he’s brutally murdered two little girls in a spectacularly gruesome crime. Natch, spectacular gruesomeness being another sine qua non for the bestselling crime novel. Indirection and misdirection abound, with lots of talky exposition, the requisite maverick-y norm-flouting (“At this precise moment, I am violating the rules of ethics and perhaps a criminal statute as well”), and the usual sarcastic world-weariness (“The jurors don’t believe any of this because they have known for some time that Gardy was a member of a satanic cult with a history of sexual perversion”). All this is to be expected in a genre bound by convention as tightly as our perp bound the ankles of his victims, but the reader can see most of the mystery coming from a long way off, making the yarn less effective than most. And the clichés pile on a bit too thickly, from the large-breasted moll to the bored judge who dozes at the bench.
One wonders if Grisham weren’t sleeping through some of this as well. Whatever the case, one of his lesser cases.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53943-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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