Doughtie has tendered an understated, sophisticated, revealing legal entertainment that leaves the reader wanting more.
Retired jurist Doughtie presents a twisty legal drama of nasty doings in northern Florida.
Judge Alva “AC” Cason sits on the bench of Florida’s Eighth Judicial Circuit, hearing and passing judgment on the miseries spilled out in the family division. Much of the business is sad but tedious: “He thought he could do this job in his sleep, but remembered he sometimes did just that, which was generally frowned upon.” Doughtie is having fun here, for AC is drawn as a warm and decent man, learned, confident and ethical, informed but not flouting. He is a rich character, as are the other principals, whose complexity gives the story its pleasing misdirection and color. Doughtie ably handles a number of strands—an increasingly ugly child dependency case, a crooked judge, rich folks ruining everything, a con man overstepping his moral boundaries and a surging romantic relationship between AC and caseworker—as he authentically engages the legal system. It is clear that Doughtie loves the legal profession, though he is not above teasing it: “Judge AC tried to exhibit the concerned expression of a person with hemorrhoids”; he revels in explaining courtroom minutiae with expository narrative that only feels forced when he takes it outside judicial business, as when detailing the con man’s tricks. Equal to, if not transcending, the legal aspects of the story is the love affair of AC and Vicky, sweetly and very physically presented, yet, thankfully, unlike the law, not minutely. Indeed, Doughtie keeps the tale quite everyday, avoiding the theatrical and extravagant, but allowing for him to give time pondering such elements as the Florida landscape that he loves as much as the law: turkey oaks and wiregrass, the rosemary bushes and tumbledown farms, the dozy inland river ways and the pencil factory that ate all the cedars. The final pages offer a dumbfounding surprise, and an emotional cliffhanger.
Doughtie has tendered an understated, sophisticated, revealing legal entertainment that leaves the reader wanting more.Pub Date: May 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-1425103590
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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