An extraordinary hero stars in a legal tale as believable as it is riveting.
In this 15th installment of a thriller series, a Miami lawyer takes a stance against football after a high school player’s alarming injury.
As a former Miami Dolphins linebacker, attorney Jake Lassiter knows how dangerous football can be. All that contact on the field left him with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and he suffers the constant pounding of migraines and tinnitus. He also has problems with his memory and can’t recall coaxing his friend and old Dolphins teammate Langston “Tank” Pittman to forge his own wife’s name on a consent form—allowing the couple’s teen son, Rodrigo, to play football. So when Rod is seriously hurt during a game’s kickoff and may never walk again, guilt practically crushes Lassiter, the boy’s de facto uncle. The lawyer vows to “abolish” football, though he’s really after a temporary ban until the Florida High School Athletic Association declares the sport safe. He has barely filed suit (against the school’s coach and the FHSAA) when he gets a taste of the hostile defiance he was anticipating. The Consortium, a supposed organization of high-profile companies, aims to protect high school football, as a legal action against it also threatens the billion-dollar NCAA and NFL. But Lassiter has a solid case for “coaching malpractice,” from the coach keeping an unmistakably disoriented Rod in the game to the man running illegal pit drills during team practice. Unfortunately, the defense attorneys play dirty, as Lassiter suspects they’ve got people following, tracking, and wiretapping him. It’s sure to be a white-knuckled fight if Lassiter wants a win in the courtroom.
In this series outing, Levine’s recurring protagonist proves sublimely complex. He’s a whip-smart lawyer whose painful bouts with merciless CTE earn him sympathy. But he’s not always a purely ethical professional; as Rod’s mom rightly points out, Lassiter pursues this case more for himself than for the injured teen and his family. The rest of the cast is also strong—loyal pal Tank is the opposite of his wife, who blames Lassiter for their son’s tragedy, while the FHSAA’s attorney Sandra Day is a formidable and possibly unscrupulous opponent. The author fuels this legal thriller with an impressive pace, showing that a deceptively simple “wack-a-doodle lawsuit” can churn out endless surprises and bumps in the road. Lassiter, for example, digs up evidence from a TV news program—with the help of a skilled hacker—and from a crucial item that someone’s been keeping. The attorney is moreover up against the defense’s questionable evidence; an offer that looks an awful lot like a bribe; and strangers creeping around his property. Meanwhile, understated humor brightens the novel courtesy of Lassiter’s charming quips (even in court). But random citizens’ periodic tweets provide the biggest laughs; they’re rife with assumptions, sarcasm, and amusing spellings (“I heard Lassiter is dying. Well, I say good writtens”). The ending courtroom battle sears with intense and realistic turns, as at least one of Lassiter’s smoking guns unexpectedly fizzles. It all builds to an unforgettable closing scene.
An extraordinary hero stars in a legal tale as believable as it is riveting.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-73450-569-6
Page Count: 417
Publisher: Herald Square Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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