An uplifting story of a man revisiting his past to save the future for others.
In Franklin’s debut novel, an obscure mountain town engages in legal fisticuffs versus Los Angeles over ownership of Lake Clarity.
Ted Gables, attorney at a prestigious New York law firm, returns to California after his father has a stroke. His father had been heading a committee to save the diminishing Lake Clarity, a water source for LA. Charles Vegoran, a devious, politically ambitious lawyer working for the big city, allows the case to go to the state Supreme Court, against the mayor’s wishes. Vegoran, however, didn’t plan on Gables supporting his small town’s cause. The attorney’s research uncovers the fact that Gables, in his youth, had ties to a 50-year-old story of a band of outlaws dynamiting aqueducts near Clarity Craters to preserve the lake. Some characters, such as Gables’ girlfriend’s father, Hayden Lane, and businessman, Anthony Sorano, enter the story without enough exposition. On the other hand, Gables’ relationships with his girlfriend, Romie, and the girl he left behind, Skye, are given an understated but complete arc. Franklin’s novel initially feels like a series of flashbacks, and the striking backstory—Gables’ father blaming himself for his brother’s death and Ted befriending the feared street fighter in middle school—develops the characters, but it also stalls the main plot. At the same time, the various subplots have clear ties to Gables and the lake. It’s an effective method, forming a circular story that’s a constant reminder of Lake Clarity, where all the plotlines converge. The book shifts into second gear when the Supreme Court hears the case, and Sorano’s enforcers—a boxer and his manager—throw around some muscle to scare off the committee.
An uplifting story of a man revisiting his past to save the future for others.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Richard Scott Franklin
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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