The answer, of course, is all of the above in this lightweight but ebulliently seamless melding of Levine’s two legal-eagles...
Levine brings ex-Dolphin Jake Lassiter, Esq., (State vs. Lassiter, 2013, etc.) together with his other series regulars Solomon and Lord, of the Florida bar (Habeas Porpoise, 2014, etc.), under the most trying circumstances possible when Lord asks Lassiter to defend Solomon on a murder charge.
The outlook isn’t brilliant for his client. Everyone agrees that Bar girl Nadia Delova waltzed into Steve Solomon’s office and offered him $5,000 to accompany her to the office of Club Anastasia owner Nicolai Gorev, the boss she said was holding her passport and some money he owed her. Gorev, suspecting that one of his callers was wearing a wire, pulled a gun on them and demanded that they strip. While his eye was on Steve, Nadia pulled a gun from her own purse. What happened next is a little unclear, but once the dust settled, Steve was alone in a locked room with Gorev’s corpse waiting for the Miami cops to come and Mirandize him. Nadia, naturally, has vanished, and attempts to find her only provoke more violent death. Victoria Lord, Steve’s partner and girlfriend, may bicker with him nonstop, but she can’t believe he’s a killer, so she reaches out to Jake, who can believe anything. With such a limited range of possibilities, you might think the prospects for surprise are limited, too: either Nadia killed Gorev or Steve did. But Levine focuses instead on the different legal strategies each turn of events offers Jake. Will he put the blame for everything on the absent Nadia? Once she turns up and gets immunity for her testimony against Steve, will he argue that the gun went off accidentally? Will he do his best to impeach the testimony of the one and only witness against his client? Or will he do something else entirely?
The answer, of course, is all of the above in this lightweight but ebulliently seamless melding of Levine’s two legal-eagles series.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4778-7986-3
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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