An assured and wholly absorbing legal tale.
In this debut thriller, a lawyer reluctantly joins her first criminal case while trying to stay focused on her family.
As one of the few women at a large Chicago law firm, Maeve Shaw hopes to make partner. But after her second maternity leave, there’s little work available for her, and she struggles to maintain billable hours. Regardless, she steers clear of an imminent pro-bono murder trial. She has an apparent hatred of criminal law, stemming from her troubled childhood with an addict mother and a perpetually angry attorney father. But “the murder team,” wanting a female counselor, requests Maeve. The client is Tammy Sanford, a mom who supposedly strangled her 23-year-old daughter, Kyleigh, a frequent child beauty pageant winner who later became addicted to opioids. Maeve delves into the trial, but a recent discovery about her husband, Patrick, is distracting. He may be having an affair. Though a text message and further evidence aren’t rock solid, they’re certainly suspicious. She’s determined to keep her family together while her boss implies she’ll lose her job if her billables wane. And as she’s sure Tammy is innocent, Maeve and her best friend, Zara Patel, do some investigating of their own. Manning’s novel convincingly mingles Maeve’s personal and professional lives. This character-driven story reveals a woman thriving under intense pressure, even if she occasionally stumbles. As readers only know as much as Maeve does, there’s mystery surrounding both the murder trial and Patrick’s possible adultery. The tale is mostly gloomy, as the mother of two deals with a sexist boss; seems to blame herself, at least partly, for what Patrick may have done; and, via intermittent flashbacks, endures negligent parents. Fortunately, instances of humor offer relief, including scenes involving an odd Brazilian and a webcam failure. The author reinforces her taut narrative with punchy dialogue while each subplot concludes memorably.
An assured and wholly absorbing legal tale. (acknowledgements)Pub Date: June 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73504-931-1
Page Count: 217
Publisher: Bowker
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Another disappointment from this bestselling author.
What happened to Billy Barringer?
Thirty years after the disappearance of his best friend, Ethan Marsh is back in his childhood home on Hemlock Circle. His mom and dad have just moved to Florida, and they asked Ethan to look after the place until they can sell it, but all three of them know that he needs a place to stay while he tries to get his life back on track. Given that the trauma associated with Billy’s vanishing has turned into a lasting obsession for Ethan—one that disrupts his sleep and casts a pall on his marriage—it seems unlikely that the community he went to boarding school to escape will be much of a refuge, but…sure? As it happens, the babysitter he crushed on as a kid has also come home to take care of her father. Another childhood friend is raising his own family in the house where he grew up. And a one-time bully is now a detective. All of these people were involved in the events leading up to Billy’s disappearance, and they’re all together again when new information about the case surfaces. Sager is a gimmicky author; this isn’t a slam. Horror is a gimmicky genre and, although Sager doesn’t write horror, exactly, his use of horror tropes is a distinctive element of his novels. And fans may well be ready to accept this band of sleuths or ghost hunters or potential suspects working together to solve a 30-year-old mystery. They may, however, be less forgiving of the red herrings and a complicated resolution that raises more questions than it answers. The real sin here, though, is that this book is intensely boring. Ethan Marsh might be a sympathetic character, but he’s not an interesting character, and the narrative pace is punishingly slow.
Another disappointment from this bestselling author.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780593472378
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
All the narrative propulsion of escapist fiction without the escape.
Paced like a prophetic thriller, this novel suggests that "pandemic" is a continuing series.
Shepard has frequently employed research as a foundation for his literary creations, but never before in such pulse-racing fashion. He's set this narrative in the near future, when the threat of Covid-19 has passed but provides a cautionary lesson. And what have we learned from it? Not enough, apparently, as an outbreak within an extremely isolated settlement of Greenland begins its viral spread around the globe. Readers will find themselves in territory that feels eerily familiar—panic, politics, uncertainty, fear, a resistance to quarantine, an overload of media noise—as Shepard's command of tone never lets the tension ease. Eleven-year-old Aleq somehow survives the initial outbreak, which takes the lives of everyone close to him, and he may provide the key to some resolution if anyone can get him to talk. The novel follows the boy and the pandemic from Greenland to a laboratory facility in Montana as, in little more than a month, the virus or whatever it is, spread by touching, traveling, breathing, has infected some 14 million around the world. Jeannine Dziri and Danice Torrone, a pair of young researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who have dubbed themselves the “Junior Certain Death Squad,” find themselves on the front lines as they attempt to balance personal relationships (which occasionally read like plot contrivances) with all-consuming professional responsibilities. Meanwhile, the pandemic proceeds relentlessly. “APOCALYPSE II?” screams a Fox graphic amid “the social media cacophony,” as mass hysteria shows how human nature can take a horrible situation and make it so much worse. And though the novel builds to a sort of redemption, it suggests that there will be no resolution to the current pandemic beyond nervous anticipation toward the ones to come. Channeling Pasteur, Shepard promises—or threatens—“It will always be the microbes that have the last word.”
All the narrative propulsion of escapist fiction without the escape.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-65545-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
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