Teen angst, dueling conspirators, human smugglers, cops of every moral stripe, and a lawyer heroine whose behavior ranges...
A murdered family leaves only one survivor in this second roller-coaster case for Los Angeles attorney Samantha Brinkman.
Not content with stabbing high school senior Abel Sonnenberg to death, or maybe just surprised that a sudden case of food poisoning has sent his parents home early from their date night, someone attacks Stephen and Paula Sonnenberg as well, leaving him dead and her critically wounded. Detective Westin Emmons, of the Glendale Police, naturally takes a lively interest in Cassie Sonnenberg, the adopted 15-year-old daughter who somehow managed to survive this massacre, perhaps because she carried it out. Tiegan Donner, Cassie’s teacher and counselor, begs Sam to represent Cassie, who certainly needs someone in her corner, and Sam settles in to listen to the first of many stories Cassie will tell her, some of them backed up by hard evidence, others not so much. While this pot is boiling furiously, Clark cuts away repeatedly to two other cases: a request by Sam’s father, Dale Pearson, an LAPD cop she’s already defended on murder charges (Blood Defense, 2016), to look into Julio Valenzuela’s allegations that Dale’s fellow officer Kevin Hausch used excessive force in his arrest; and the ongoing saga of Ernesto Orozco and his son Arturo, who want Sam to identify the person who secretly arranged for Arturo’s brother, Ricardo, to get sent to a prison unit where rival gang members were certain to kill him—not knowing that the sneaky culprit this time was Sam herself. Cassie’s case, complicated by a disturbing echo of Sam’s own teenage years, builds to a rare intensity that’s undermined every time Clark (The Competition, 2014, etc.) drops it for one of Sam’s other two problems, one of which seems likely to hang over her head in the sequel.
Teen angst, dueling conspirators, human smugglers, cops of every moral stripe, and a lawyer heroine whose behavior ranges from the naively credulous to the downright criminal. Whatever you read legal fiction for, it’s here, along with quite a bit of other stuff.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5039-3977-6
Page Count: 460
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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