Well-written, insightful, and spooky—an entertaining courtroom tale.
An attorney defends a childhood friend on a murder charge while receiving guidance from his mentor’s ghost in this debut legal thriller.
Born in the early 1980s in Chico, a California farming town, the nameless narrator of this novel becomes a lawyer in the U.S. Navy’s Judge Advocate General Corps in South Florida. His apathy is, for once, replaced by pride and a sense of purpose. But when his lover, a former client, breaks things off with him, she reports him to his commanding officer, forcing the narrator’s resignation. Deciding that moving back to Chico might be a good idea, he sends around a highly embellished resume and gets an offer. In Chico, the narrator’s new boss, John Hodgkinson, becomes his mentor until dying about a year later. The narrator begins his own practice, his confidence increasing, although being back in Chico is lonely. His family ties are frayed (his mother’s dementia is worsening) and during many solitary hours, he drinks and goes on long drives, which later he recollects only vaguely. In 2016, the narrator’s self-assurance is shaken again by the homicide case he’s assigned, given that his resume falsely claimed experience with felony murder trials. His client is Scotty Watts, a high school acquaintance who’s deteriorated from sports hero to drug addict and jailbird. Scotty has since tried to go straight, but now faces a murder charge, claiming to remember nothing about why he was discovered mopping up a large pool of blood. No body can be found, but the amount of blood suggests murder. As the narrator investigates, he notices that something about the case is weirdly familiar. Odder still, Scotty’s dog begins speaking to him, and the narrator sees and hears John, who offers advice and commentary. As the narrator defends his client and keeps searching, he gets closer to unbearable truths. In his novel, Benson offers a believable courtroom drama that’s nicely explicated and grounded in good legal details such as the voir dire jury-selection process. The Chico setting also contributes to the overall story; for example, the tension between traditional agricultural farmers and marijuana growers like Scotty suggests possible motives for framing him. Beyond that, the author takes a standard form, the legal thriller, and adds subtle notes of psychological/supernatural suspense. John’s ghostly presence in the narrator’s life is at first mild, though strange; he offers supportive remarks and wise counsel, such as a book recommendation (The Conscience of a Lawyer by David Mellinkoff). The dog’s occasional comments could be seen as imaginative or even whimsical. But John’s appearances become frightening; he sports a grotesquely stretched-out smile and repeats phrases over and over (“The bandanna, the water, the farmers, the lot, the wind, the rain”) that have something to do with the murder, and drive the narrator to distraction. The groundwork for all this is laid early on, but with such a light touch that clues are easy to overlook, and will keep many readers guessing until the end.
Well-written, insightful, and spooky—an entertaining courtroom tale.Pub Date: July 1, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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