Despite its straightforward formula, the book’s intense action, realistic tone and memorable characters will keep readers...
Lawyer Jeff Trask is just settling into his new job as an Assistant U.S. Attorney when he becomes embroiled in what seems at first to be a simple murder case, but quickly evolves into a high-stakes international case that could break an already-strapped legal system.
Trask is a rookie U.S Attorney who believes in “the system” and all who participate in it. However, his first case ends up challenging his notion of how to do his job and who to trust. Fans of the legal-thriller genre will recognize the usual suspects: the unlikely cop duo, the wise supervisor and even the insider bad guy. Still, the stock characters are well developed, and the elements are assembled so seamlessly that the story feels fresh. Rainer’s attention to setting also shines through. The streets of Washington, D.C., come alive; those who have lived or worked in the nation’s capital will recognize Rainer’s cunning use of seedy locales to give the action in the book a realistic tone. Perhaps too much time is spent setting up all the major players in this story, so impatient readers will need to resist the urge to flip forward and go directly to the action. Trask, an engaging and relatable main character, frequently finds himself questioning those closest to him as he works to find out who is behind the heinous murders plaguing D.C. Despite being exceedingly intelligent, he comes across as an everyman. Refreshingly, the legal jargon is kept to a minimum, so the reader can focus on the mystery at hand. But the story drags where romance is concerned: Trask’s relationship with Lynn Preston feels forced because it’s developed too quickly. The two meet early in the story, yet although their relationship takes some twists and turns, it rarely feels real, as opposed to the authentic locations and crime scenes. Fortunately, the narrative spends more time with the investigation, giving readers ample opportunity to connect the dots while second guessing nearly everyone’s motivations.
Despite its straightforward formula, the book’s intense action, realistic tone and memorable characters will keep readers engrossed in this popcorn thriller with a superb payoff.Pub Date: March 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468180213
Page Count: 332
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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