An effective David-and-Goliath courtroom drama that will satisfy fans of legal thrillers.
Two sobering cases challenge an atheistic, alcoholic attorney in need of redemption in Shabel’s mystery.
Joshua Logan makes a lousy first impression. In this novel set in 1968, he’s introduced hungover and still in bed when he should be in a Miami Beach courtroom representing a client whose name escapes him. Belatedly, he wishes that he’d had stayed home last night and looked over three-years’ worth of prep work. “I had to stop drinking,” he ruminates. “One more time and my fucking license would be gone.” To his credit, Logan, a “lawyer to the poor,” fights the good fights. The client he has trouble recalling is George Benash, who fell into a vat of boiling sulfuric acid at the Anchor Chemical factory where he’s worked for 30 years, leaving him with extensive third-degree burns. Another case hits closer to home: His beloved aunt Helen Lieberman, a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Poland, calls him in a panic after the city’s political and legal powers-that-be move to evict her and her three friends from a building in Miami Beach, where they’ve lived for more than 10 years. Neither case is a slam dunk for the former washout basketball player–turned–car salesman—and eventual lawyer. It turns out the developer, Horst Hillenbrandt, who’s trying to evict Helen and her friends, has a dark past, and he’ll stop at nothing to unleash his army of bulldozers and cranes on the building. Both cases are engaging, and readers will root for Logan’s underdog clients. Shabel, a lawyer himself, conjures a blatantly biased judge for his protagonist to go up against; at one point, the jurist pronounces, in open court, “Are you ready to try this ridiculous case, Mr. Logan?” His clear bias may raise objections from readers who are seasoned court watchers, but it recalls other courtroom dramas, such as the film The Verdict(1982), as does Logan himself, who, like Paul Newman’s character in that film, struggles to get his act together. Overall, though, it’s Helen’s case that’s the most compelling, with its heroic defendants confronting their worst nightmare.
An effective David-and-Goliath courtroom drama that will satisfy fans of legal thrillers.Pub Date: March 13, 2023
ISBN: 9798386914165
Page Count: 354
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.
Lt. Eve Dallas is sucked into a murder that may well be overshadowed by another crime—and by the news that Roarke, her billionaire husband, is implicated in both felonies in an unexpected and troubling way.
Disturbed from her sleep, Aileen Carville arises to discover her wealthy husband, Nathan Barrister, coshed to death by a heavy amethyst from the collection of his late father, Zip Global founder Henry J. Barrister. His corpse is lying outside an open vault that everyone in the family insists they hadn’t known about until a couple of months ago, and it’s filled with priceless paintings and sculptures and jewels taken years ago from an A-list of museums, one of which—the Royal Suite, a legendary emerald setting—has evidently been stolen once again. The bombshell revelation that Henry must have commissioned the thefts himself leads to two questions—how did the thief who killed Nathan know about the vault and its contents, and what possessed Nathan’s wealthy father to steal and hide all these goodies in the first place?—that are much more interesting than whodunit, though only one of them will be satisfactorily answered. Another bombshell revelation follows: Roarke’s confession to Dallas that he stole the Royal Suite from London’s Tate Gallery when he was still a teenager, years before he turned away from a life of crime himself. Since Interpol is much more interested in the theft than the murder, there’s a real danger that they’ll decide Roarke was once again the thief. So, Dallas faces the double challenge of solving the crimes and keeping her beloved husband out of the frame.
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414526
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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
© 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.
