A fast-paced legal drama whose disturbing revelations feel all too real.
Papantonio’s legal thriller centers around a wrongful death in a home for troubled youth.
The narrative begins with a horrifying anecdote as the author takes readers back to the summer of 1970, landing in the reform school known as Sandbury Housing for Boys, which amounts to a juvenile detention center going by a more palatable name. Wayward teen Bucky Carlton is incarcerated but surviving in this brutal environment when one of the guards forces him into a ritual known as “Fight Night,” in which the teenage boys are pitted against each other and made to slug it out over one infraction or another. When the fight isn’t called off fast enough, Bucky is killed. The narrator ominously notes that this same kind of behavior persists, jumping forward to the present day and a similar youth facility known as B Camp School for Boys. Trayvon Clapper, the runaway teen son of addiction-afflicted parents, is having such a rough time there that he seeks the relative safety of solitary confinement by acting out against a guard, only to be killed by that very same adult with the help of a few “long-timers”—especially violent children the guards see as futureless. The narrative then shifts to 71-year-old lawyer Nicholas “Deke” Deketomis, a hugely successful attorney who’s made a name for himself by taking on—and sometimes defeating—major drug companies. When Trayvon’s parents show up in his Florida offices seeking financial restitution for their son’s death, Deke surprises the other lawyers in his firm by taking the case. Through his colleague Gina and his daughter (and co-worker) Cara, readers come to learn that Deke has his own history with youth correctional facilities, and with Bucky Carlton himself. As Deke’s firm takes on the case, they’re drawn into the orbit of a crooked, psychotic Massachusetts senator and the shadowy corporation, Phoenix Industries, that owns Camp B School for Boys.
Papantonio’s novel is nothing if not a page-turner, beginning with that brutal opening set piece and carrying readers through the paces of the plot with satisfying swiftness. At times, literary-minded readers may struggle with some of the expository dialogue and cliched phrasing (“Not only was [Deke] married to Teri, his wife of four decades, but he was also wed to his work”), but these hiccups are mitigated by the author’s command of the subject matter. The author is a lawyer, and his skill in deftly conveying legalese and the idiosyncrasies of the justice system in a manner palatable to legal novices is a boon to the narrative; secure in the authenticity of the details, readers are able to focus on more salient matters of plot and character rather than losing focus on legal jargon. (At one point, after a colleague tells Deke, “‘[The judge] set it sua sponte without any request from the defense,’” the narrator explains, “That legal term referred to actions judges might take without first receiving a motion from any of the parties involved. It was the kind of hearing that rarely ended well for lawyers.”) Between the legal intrigue and the unfolding history of Deke’s own troubled past, there’s plenty here to keep readers gripped throughout.
A fast-paced legal drama whose disturbing revelations feel all too real.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781648211706
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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