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
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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