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
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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.
