From the author of An Act of Love (1997), among others: a clear-eyed look at a friendship between two couples that almost implodes when a child becomes seriously ill and damaging secrets are revealed. Narrator Lucy West is married to Max and is the mother of 14-year-old Margaret and first-grader Jeremy. The Wests live in a small town, where Max is editor of the local newspaper, and life has mostly been good, but as Lucy begins her story, in June 1998, she’s suffering from panic attacks. She’s been offered a job with a prestigious ad agency in nearby Boston, and she fears that Max, who himself suffers from depression, might not be able to cope if she works full-time. As the summer progresses, Lucy finds she has to deal with even more disturbing problems, these detailed in chapters alternating with her recollections of the recent past. Lucy and Max are close friends with Kate and Chip Cunningham, parents of Matthew and Abby. The two women share confidences, their children are pals, the couples socialize and vacation together on Nantucket. As in all friendships, though, there are the inevitable moments of envy and competition. Lucy’s memories of the early years of the West/Cunningham bond reveal one especially fraught period. Lucy had a stillborn baby, and grieving Max ignored his wife, who found it hard to be friends with Kate when she gave birth to Abby shortly thereafter. A brief affair with Chip revitalized Lucy and her marriage; soon after, she was pregnant with Jeremy. But when Jeremy is diagnosed in August 1998 with cystic fibrosis, a genetically caused disease, and the doctor suggests Max be tested, Lucy has to admit that Chip could also be the father. Will her confession end not just her friendship with Kate but her marriage? Can love and loyalty endure . . . even barely? Plot-driven, yes, but there’s more than enough compensation in Thayer’s insights into the tangled webs woven by friendship. (Literary Guild alternate selection)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20613-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
Contains everything readers have come to expect from powerhouse Connelly. Bonus: Additional installments hold the intriguing...
Fresh from returning Harry Bosch to the LAPD with The Closers (2005), veteran crime novelist Connelly offers intrigue and bracing twists in his first legal thriller.
Criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller is known as a “Lincoln lawyer” because he does business while being driven from courthouse to courthouse in his Town Car. Scraping by by defending lowlifes, some of whom offer their chauffeur services to work off Haller’s fees, he stumbles across a dream client: a rich boy accused of viciously beating a woman. Most important for Haller, Louis Roulet loudly proclaims his innocence, and his family has the dough to pay top-dollar for representation. But Haller’s father, J. Michael Haller (making Bosch and Haller half-brothers, Connelly’s wink to longtime fans) said there was “no client as scary as an innocent man,” and soon Haller is confronted with the consequences that come from the system’s inevitable compromises. When Haller’s investigator and friend is murdered for getting too close to the truth, he’s forced to confront the cost of sacrificing ideals for pragmatism. To spill more plot detail would spoil a good deal of the considerable fun here; suffice to say the conflict sparks in Haller an epic case of cognitive dissonance. Connelly gets the legal details and maneuvers just right, and Haller is a great character—world-weary but funny and likable—he’s never met an angle he couldn’t play or a corner he couldn’t cut.
Contains everything readers have come to expect from powerhouse Connelly. Bonus: Additional installments hold the intriguing possibility of one day seeing Bosch and Haller together on the streets of L.A.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-73493-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK TO SCREEN
PLB 0-688-13166-2 King Midas And The Golden Touch ($16.00; PLB $15.63; Apr.; 32 pp.; 0-688-13165-4; PLB 0-688-13166-2): The familiar tale of King Midas gets the golden touch in the hands of Craft and Craft (Cupid and Psyche, 1996). The author takes her inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s retelling, capturing the essence of the tale with the use of pithy dialogue and colorful description. Enchanting in their own right, the illustrations summon the Middle Ages as a setting, and incorporate colors so lavish that when they are lost to the uniform gold spurred by King Midas’s touch, the point of the story is further burnished. (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-13165-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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