As one of his stricken enemies muses about the hero, “The man had more lives than a cat” —an assessment that economically...
Attorney/radio interviewer/nonfiction author Papantonio (Air America: The Playbook, 2006, etc.) debuts a Florida lawyer hero who’d look a lot like him if his fictional avatar's busy professional docket weren’t complicated by his own trial for manslaughter.
Nick "Deke" Deketomis is the man you call when some faceless corporation has made you suffer terribly. But his advocacy doesn’t come cheap. Just ask 19-year-old Annica Phillips, left partially paralyzed by Ranidol, Bekmeyer Pharmaceuticals’ birth control drug, who dies in open court after an ill-qualified judge refuses to admit the eminent toxicologist Deke’s chosen as an expert witness. His lead client’s death doesn’t end Deke’s crusade against Bekmeyer, of course; he just chooses another lead plaintiff and heads back to the courtroom. With his other hand, he’s preparing a lawsuit against monumental polluter S.I. Oil, the cash cow of politically connected billionaires Kurt and Anton Swanson. In the meantime, however, an infernal cabal, including county prosecutor Darl Dixon and Pentecostal Pastor Rodney Morgan, that’s decided to impeach Deke in a big way succeeds beyond its wildest dreams: the poor fool who’s been unwillingly sent to provoke Deke into a fistfight so the secret recording can be leaked to the public ends up dead instead, and Deke’s unintentionally fatal blow is faithfully captured on said video. How can you continue to labor for 25-hour days as a high-profile scourge of corporate interests when you’re a criminal defendant yourself? It would be totally impossible—unless Deke gets help from an unexpected quarter in exposing a dread secret about his tormentors that readers have known about ever since the starting gun.
As one of his stricken enemies muses about the hero, “The man had more lives than a cat” —an assessment that economically conveys both the moral complexity of the legal universe on display here and the guileless appeal of Papantonio’s bumper-sticker prose.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59079-367-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: SelectBooks
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
