Three years ago, Roberto Morales, self-made developer of Brooklyn's Phoenix Project, was convicted of manslaughter in the brutal sex killing of Mariah Dodge, his associate and lover. But the conviction was overturned on appeal, setting the stage for a new trial whose prosecutor will find himself hamstrung by problems in the old one. Ever alert to opportunities for ethnic politics, the D.A.'s office has assigned Joe Estrada to prosecute Morales, a hero of the Latino community. But Joe, whose father bragged about his titled Castillian ancestors and married into the D.A.R., worries that he'll be pilloried as a phony Latino long before the trial begins. Joe's got more urgent worries too: Disturbing gaps turn up in the original police investigation; witnesses who gave Morales a motive—Mariah's determination to break off their affair—and placed him at the scene start to waffle; Mariah's cryptic diary implicates her and a Houston mentor in skimming $25 million from the Phoenix Project. The diary turns into a lasting nightmare, since Mariah's father denies its existence, and the bits of it Joe pries out of Mariah's avenging-angel sister Tess are all censored by her mother. Even as Joe fears he won't be allowed to introduce the diary into evidence, he puts off turning it over to the defense until he can produce a missing witness, the diary's ``Johnny,'' who can corroborate the evidence of the diary and put Morales away for good. Months pass—and you'll feel the weight of every day—before Johnny's finally lured out of hiding to go head-to- head with Morales in a memorable climax. This may be the most grueling courtroom novel ever written. The investigation, the discovery, the trial—everything takes forever, yet the effect is singularly concentrated; the steady march of events develops an overwhelming force. For pyrotechnical range and open- mouthed surprise, though, Friedman (Reasonable Doubt, 1990, etc.) has nothing on Richard North Patterson's Degree of Guilt (below). (Literary Guild Dual Selection for January)
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1992
ISBN: 1-55611-330-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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