An ambitious but melodramatic courtroom tale.
A scarred man goes on trial for the death of the woman he loved in this legal thriller.
Jack Holt is standing trial for rape and murder. The victim is Maggie Navarro Stewart, a world-famous model and millionaire who was trapped in an abusive marriage to gastroenterologist Daniel Stewart. Jack and Maggie met by chance one day in a park, and she saw something in the humble warehouse worker that no one had before. Jack still bears the scars—physical and emotional—from the childhood accident that killed his father and sisters. The disfigurement to his face has mostly kept him from love—until he met Maggie, that is. Then, one day, Maggie disappeared shortly after informing Daniel she wanted a divorce. She was soon found strangled to death. Police discovered Jack’s DNA on her person, and he did not help himself by refusing to talk to them. Now, he may be facing life in prison. Jack is given a public defender, the disgraced lawyer Joe Hammer. Joe used to be a great prosecutor before he was disbarred for withholding evidence. His wife left him after the incident, and he’s since been plagued with stomach disorders and sleeping problems. Defending Jack is his shot at redemption, and he means to do it by the book. Meanwhile, a jury of conflicting personalities is assembled to rule on the case. Most are ready to convict Jack, but a few holdouts force the jury to consider the alternative. The trial will prove a roller coaster for all involved, as new facts and surprise witnesses continue to alter the shape of the case. As the trial goes on, Jack increasingly escapes into his dreams, where he and the dead Maggie discuss the events that brought them there—and whether or not he should join her in the afterlife.
Elzey makes bold choices with the novel’s structure, leaping forward and backward in time and using dream sequences to fill in much of Jack’s and Maggie’s backstories. The prose is readable, but there is a draftlike quality to it that suggests a lack of editing. Here he takes three sentences to communicate the age of one character: “When I first saw my former boss, I couldn’t believe how old he had become. The man I hadn’t seen in many years had become a withered old man. The eighty-three-year-old judge with the help of a cane stood up to greet me.” Nearly every aspect of the story displays the same heavy-handedness. The dead Maggie is idealized while Jack has a saintly disinterest in the world. Neither feels much like a real character, and their relationship will be no more believable to readers than it is to the members of the jury. Racist juror Henry Keller is a cartoon version of a bigot, taking every opportunity to offend each person he comes in contact with. The author attempts to tie up these threads in a statement about the two different Americas—one of opportunity and one of imprisonment—but it’s all a bit too soapy to make an impact.
An ambitious but melodramatic courtroom tale.Pub Date: June 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73405-465-1
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Little House Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.
A widowed and disgraced plastic surgeon is drawn into a Russian oligarch’s evil schemes.
Witherspoon’s adult fiction debut, co-authored with thrillermeister Coben, opens as heart surgery performed by Dr. Marc Adams in a North African refugee camp is interrupted by the explosive invasion of armed militants. It's the last we will see of Marc in this dimension. The next chapter jumps ahead one year to a ceremony at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where his widow, Maggie McCabe, is supposed to be presenting an award in honor of her mother. Miserable and anxious about appearing in public after having lost her medical license, she consults with her late husband on her phone—not via supernatural means, but using a "griefbot," an amazingly lifelike and functional AI app created by her genius sister, Sharon. Once the griefbot coaxes her to brave the sneering masses, she learns she’s been replaced on the podium anyway. But she runs into a former professor, a celebrity plastic surgeon, who requests a meeting with her at his office in New York and won’t take no for an answer. Next thing she knows, there’s $10 million in her bank account and she’s on a private plane heading to a palace outside Moscow where she’s been engaged to perform off-the-record surgery on billionaire Oleg Ragoravich (new face) and his girlfriend, Nadia (new boobs). And…we’re off. A whirl of surgeries, chases, and escapes ensues as Maggie gradually comes to understand who these people are and what they have in mind for her, and how it connects to Marc and their missing friend and business partner, Trace Packer. She is aided by her delightful father-in-law, Porkchop, owner of a biker bar in New York City and a very handy guy to have on your team if you've run afoul of an international criminal organization. From the palace in Rublevka the action moves to Dubai and then Bordeaux, climaxing in a high-stakes illegal heart transplant. But wait—is Marc really dead? What happened to Trace? Who is Nadia really? Though these smoldering questions don’t quite catch fire, it's a good first try for Witherspoon.
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538774700
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Fast-moving and disturbingly plausible.
Robots may be the future of warfare in this final father-son DeMille collaboration.
In Camp Hayden, Army Maj. Roger Ames is found dead, his skull crushed. Chief Warrant Officers Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor, special agents of the United States Army Criminal Investigation Division, are sent to the Mojave Desert, “a.k.a. in the middle of nowhere,” to investigate. In this fictional military installation, Army Rangers conduct field training exercises with lethal autonomous weapons. These “dangerous new toys,” nicknamed “tin men,” may become the future of warfare if they can be programmed to distinguish between friend and foe. Anyway, the Rangers’ job is to train the tin men, not the other way around. They are AI-driven robotic prototypes called D-17s, but even prototypes can kill. Did a bot kill the major? And was there criminal liability or intent, or was it a tragic accident? Brodie and Taylor discover that not everyone loves these beasts, and they must find out if humans are programming them for mischief or even trying to set up the program for failure. Meanwhile, the bots have nicknames. Bot number 20 is Bucky, seen on a video as a “seven-foot-tall titanium machine with hands covered in blood and brain matter” that has “a face but no eyes, with hands but no skin, with a body but no soul.” As scary as these beasties are, Brodie and Taylor must also look at the humans at Camp Hayden, because they learn that the “machines don’t have motives….They have inputs and outputs,” which naturally come from human programmers. They have neither brains nor courage nor honor; they do have brute force, speed, and agility. Obviously, plenty goes haywire in this enjoyable yarn. It feels a bit too believable for comfort, and that’s to the DeMilles’ credit as storytellers. Nelson DeMille had begun this project with his son Alex, who had to finish it alone after his father’s death.
Fast-moving and disturbingly plausible.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781501101878
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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