Everybody will agree, however, that Rachel’s sixth case is a lot less antically amusing than her first five. Counsel is...
What looks at first like another of St. Louis attorney Rachel Gold’s variously wacky criminal cases spreads its wings into crossover territory.
Nobody would have predicted fireworks when Rachel agreed to represent her mother’s friend Ruth Alpert, a secretary laid off by Beckman Engineering after a lifetime of service. But when Beckman’s legal team, headed by piranha Kimberly Howard, weighs in with countercharges about Ruth pilfering paper clips—well, as Ruth says, “A girl hears things” that can up the ante on her side as well. The things Ruth has heard, that Beckman and five other nearby construction firms, have been engaging in a bid-rigging conspiracy for 40 years, lead to a qui tam suit that casts Ruth as chief whistleblower and puts her original private suit in the shade. By the time of Kahn’s opening episode—a meeting between Rachel and a rare witness willing to testify against the alleged conspirators ends with the witness getting shotgunned to death—it might seem clear that the case is bound for summer movie turf. Not so: Kahn (Sheer Gall, 1996) is after bigger game than Beckman and its possibly murderous cohorts. As Rachel and her buddies, romantically minded special prosecutor Jonathan Wolf and romance-proof man-mountain Prof. Benny Goldberg, scrabble for evidence of price-fixing and wonder what on earth could have kept the flinthearted Conrad Beckman in bed with his fellow conspirators for nearly half a century, they gradually link the festering malfeasance to the wartime German-American Bund and the living, breathing Bishop Kurt Robb, spiritual leader of the Church of the Aryan Jesus. Some readers will find this last layer of revelations riveting; others will shake their heads in bemusement over Rachel’s conspiracy fixations.
Everybody will agree, however, that Rachel’s sixth case is a lot less antically amusing than her first five. Counsel is deadly serious this time, and no wonder.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-84883-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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