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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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