Beats Joe Klein at his own political insider game.
A spunky young consultant gets embroiled in a vicious government scandal.
In her day job as political anchor and senior political correspondent for CNN Headline News—likely tough work but still essentially a seat at the kiddie table of TV journalism—Michele Mitchell has obviously absorbed more than her share of Beltway insider info. Normally this would spell doom for a story set mostly within that same, self-obsessed region, but in her first fiction Mitchell (A New Kind of Party Animal: How the Young Are Tearing Up the American Political Landscape, 1998) manages to stitch the politicking into her story so seamlessly that you’re never able to confuse the book with a lengthy, fictionalized op-ed piece (à la Danielle Crittenden). Kate Boothe is a young political consultant taking a break in Rome with her aristocratic Chinese/Italian boyfriend when a bombshell drops back home: an ex-boyfriend of Kate’s, muckraker extraordinaire Lyle Gold, has been accused of passing secrets to the Chinese. Zipping back to D.C., Kate and her lady-killer partner Jack crank up their small office’s p.r. machinery and try to exonerate Gold in the eyes of the public (and the law). An angered federal government and a media machine in full heat are soon bearing down on Lyle (and, later, Kate), one of the scandal’s main players gets bumped off in the D.C. subway, and Kate and Jack’s other clients want to bail. Two things keep this material fresh: first, the pointedly post-9/11 setting, where near-McCarthyism flag-waving seems not so far away (Mitchell’s not-so-veiled digs at Ashcroft, Karl Rove, Cheney, et al. are sharper than expected), and, second, Kate’s affecting resourcefulness (hardly the superwoman, she still never falls apart in the neurotic panics so beloved by many young female writers). If Mitchell plays her cards right, this could be first in a series of Kate Boothe novels.
Beats Joe Klein at his own political insider game.Pub Date: June 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-7321-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Chavez delivers a fraught if flawed page-turner that attempts too many twists.
A good Samaritan incurs a psychopath’s wrath in this debut thriller.
Veterinarian Cassie Larkin is heading home after a 12-hour shift when someone darts in front of her car, causing her to dump her energy drink. As she pulls over to mop up the mess, her headlights illuminate a couple having a physical altercation. Cassie calls 911, but before help arrives, the man tosses the woman down an embankment. Ignoring the dispatcher’s instructions, Cassie exits the vehicle and intervenes, preventing the now-unconscious woman’s murder. With sirens wailing in the distance, the man warns Cassie: “Let her die, and I’ll let you live.” He then scrambles back to the road and flees in Cassie’s van. Using mug shots, Cassie identifies the thief and would-be killer as Carver Sweet, who is wanted for poisoning his wife. The Santa Rosa police assure Cassie of her safety, but the next evening, her husband, Sam, vanishes while trick-or-treating with their 6-year-old daughter, Audrey. Hours later, he sends texts apologizing and confessing to an affair, but although it’s true that Sam and Cassie have been fighting, she suspects foul play—particularly given the previous night’s events. Cassie files a report with the cops, but they dismiss her concerns, leaving Cassie to investigate on her own. After a convoluted start, Chavez embarks on a paranoia-fueled thrill ride, escalating the stakes while exploiting readers’ darkest domestic fears. The far-fetched plot lacks cohesion and relies too heavily on coincidence to be fully satisfying, but the reader will be invested in learning the Larkin family’s fate through to the too-pat conclusion.
Chavez delivers a fraught if flawed page-turner that attempts too many twists.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293617-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
You'll kill this one fast and be glad you did.
When a corporate lawyer who divorced his first wife and married her more successful sister is found dead in his home in the Hamptons, his teenage son goes on trial for murder.
The fans who put Burke's (The Wife, 2018, etc.) last domestic thriller on the bestseller list are going to be happy with this one, a gimmick-free murder mystery with a two-stage surprise ending and uncommonly few credibility-straining plot elements. No double narrator! No unreliable narrator! No handsome psychopaths from central casting! And though there's usually at least one character in this type of book who isn't quite three-dimensional, most of the players here feel like they could have worked in a domestic novel without a murder, which is a kind of test for believability and page-worthiness. The star of the show is Chloe Taylor, a woman's magazine editor-in-chief who has become a hero of the #MeToo movement and a target of misogynist haters on social media. The lumpy area beneath the surface of her smooth, pretty life is the fact that she married her boozy, unstable, maternally incompetent sister's ex-husband and has been raising her nephew, Ethan, as her own son. When his father turns up dead, Ethan tells so many lies about his doings on the evening in question that despite the fact that he's obviously not a murderer, he ends up the No. 1 suspect. As soon as he's arrested, his real mom, Nicky, swoops into town and the sisters form an uneasy and shifting alliance. You'll think you have this thing all figured out, but a series of reveals at the eleventh hour upend those theories. Most of the important people in this novel are women—the head cop, the defense attorney, the judge—and their competent performances create a solid underpinning for the plot.
You'll kill this one fast and be glad you did.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285337-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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