Every gossipy soul has a job, a spouse, and a hidden past Blauner (Man of the Hour, 1999, etc.) knows all about. The result...
Ambitious attempt to focus all manner of contemporary suburban malaise on one woman’s murder.
The floater lacks a head, and Riverside (NY) Police Chief Harold Baltimore’s first impulse is to dismiss the victim as somebody from the lesser side of the tracks, but the liposuction scars mark it, chillingly, as a local. And the missing-persons report online sports-memorabilia salesman Jeffrey Lanier files on returning from a trip to raise venture capital instantly makes it clear that his wife Sandi’s rounds of soccer carpooling and shopping expeditions for 22 Love Lane have come to an end. Budding photographer Lynn Stockdale Schulman is devastated, not just by the loss of her best friend, but by the way Det. Lt. Michael Fallon, a lifelong Riversider who recently lost his bid for the Chief’s job, is taking the opportunity of questioning her to rekindle their high-school romance. Indifferent to her loving husband Barry, an attorney whose biotech firm is having its own problems, and to her own indifference, Michael chats up Lynn, gropes her, pulls Barry over, and arrests him. When Barry, oblivious to just how touchy a history Lynn has with Michael, urges her to file a harassment suit against him, the pot boils so furiously that it’s hard to remember poor Sandi’s murder. But Michael’s loose-cannon behavior isn’t the only thing blurring Blauner’s focus. A torrent of exhaustively observed detail—the reactions of Lynn’s reading-circle friends, the reluctance of the Salvadorean immigrant who withdrew her harassment charges against Michael, the town’s ache over the locals killed in the World Trade Center—give it a sociological richness. Underneath, though, the story is starkly simple: Who loosed the snake in the designer garden, and what are the locals going to do about it?
Every gossipy soul has a job, a spouse, and a hidden past Blauner (Man of the Hour, 1999, etc.) knows all about. The result is a whodunit that thinks it’s an epic.Pub Date: May 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-09873-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
Colorful, but best for those who don't mind Picoult's heavily sentimental style.
Teenaged witches, DNA evidence, Megan's Law, belladonna-laced tea, and an honest ex-con addicted to Jeopardy!, all mixed up in a well-researched if slightly disappointing small-town legal drama by veteran Picoult (Plain Truth, 2000, etc.).
Honest prep-school teacher and soccer coach Jack St. Bride has just completed an unjust sentence for statutory rape, to which he pleaded guilty only because a lazy lawyer persuaded him to hedge his bets. Somewhat unbelievably, he managed to escape being raped in prison by telling the brutal Mountain Felcher, "You're not going to break me." When he stops in Salem Falls, New Hampshire, to begin anew, things start looking up as he falls swiftly in love with his employer, fragile diner-owner Addie Peabody. The fact that she "tasted of coffee and loneliness" upon first kiss does not hinder Jack, but the law does: as a convicted sexual offender, he's required to register with the local police, and of course they can't keep a secret. Before long, there's widespread paranoia about the "dangerous rapist" on the loose in Salem Falls. Foremost of the alarmists is Amos Duncan, head of Duncan Pharmaceuticals, the town's only major corporation. His ire is exacerbated when his weird daughter Gillian, a devoted Wiccan, sets into action a chain of events that snares Jack in another rape charge—this time not merely statutory. One-third of the way in, the story turns into a courtroom battle between civil-liberties eccentric Jordan McAfee and sanctimonious prosecutor Matt Houlihan. Picoult's depiction of the legal process is excellent, especially her intriguing and thorough explanation of DNA evidence, and the narrative is impressively complicated, with a couple of eye-opening surprises. A few of the resolutions, however, seem contrived, and when the language turns lyrical or metaphorical, it falls flat.
Colorful, but best for those who don't mind Picoult's heavily sentimental style.Pub Date: April 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-1870-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
Twisty and propulsive.
A first date takes a sinister turn for a troubled young woman in Walker’s third psychological thriller.
It’s the day after Laura Lochner’s date with a man she met online, and she hasn’t returned to the Connecticut home of her sister, Rosie, her brother-in-law, Joe, and their little boy, Mason, where she’s been staying after a bad breakup. Rosie fears the worst, but Joe advises caution. After all, Laura is an adult and can have some fun, right? But Rosie has a bad feeling. Laura won’t answer her phone, and Rosie only has more questions after poking around online for info on Laura’s date, Jonathan Fields. Rosie eventually calls the police, and events begin to cascade like dominoes. Interspersed with Rosie’s attempt to trace Laura’s movements and get a handle on the guy she went out with is Laura’s first-person account of the actual date as well as enlightening snippets of sessions between Laura and her therapist. Laura’s is the most compelling part—a tormented, often prickly piece of storytelling by a woman carrying the pain of a horrible event that happened in high school and feelings of abandonment by a father who always seemed to love Rosie more. Laura’s desire to be loved is all-consuming, but her conviction that she is not worthy of love is heartbreaking. She sees subterfuge in nearly everything Jonathan says and does. Meanwhile, Rosie must come to terms with some ugly surprises of her own as she digs into their past. As the timelines inevitably converge, Walker’s clever misdirection paves the way to a truly chilling finale, and she has plenty of insightful things to say about the blame placed on women by society and themselves for the idiotic, careless, and sometimes downright evil things men do.
Twisty and propulsive.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-19867-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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