Middling in-and-out-of-courtroom drama, but a superior example of contemporary muckraking.
Patterson, who’s evidently never met a legal issue he couldn’t turn into page-turning fiction, takes on the vexed problem of capital punishment.
The evidence against Rennell Price and his drug-wholesaler brother Payton was overwhelming. A neighbor saw the two of them pull nine-year-old Thuy Sen off the street as she walked home from her Bayview school. Traces of hair, semen, and saliva were found in the house where they lived with their grandmother and in the trunk of the car belonging to Payton’s lieutenant, Eddie Fleet, who in due course testified that he’d helped them dump the body into San Francisco Bay. As if the facts weren’t damning enough, their lawyer was a self-confessed incompetent who took the case (thriftily bundling their defenses together) in order to support his crack habit. Following their swift convictions, the Prices have sat for 15 years on Death Row as their appeals ground through the system. Now Teresa Paget is handling Rennell’s final appeal as the clock ticks down. Patterson (Balance of Power, 2003, etc.) cunningly doles out hopeful new developments in the tiniest increments imaginable as Terri, her stepson Carlo Paget, and their habeas corpus team prepare round after round of their appeal, laboring under the draconian strictures of the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and eventually working their way up to the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Caroline Masters (The Final Judgment, 1995). Throughout their legal travails on behalf of a defendant Terri believes is both retarded and innocent, Patterson miraculously keeps the most recondite political, moral, and philosophical issues clear. But he’s less successful in creating three-dimensional characters to incarnate these dilemmas. The result is one of those rare thrillers whose most exciting parts—and there are plenty of them—are its most abstract legal arguments.
Middling in-and-out-of-courtroom drama, but a superior example of contemporary muckraking.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-45019-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
You'll kill this one fast and be glad you did.
When a corporate lawyer who divorced his first wife and married her more successful sister is found dead in his home in the Hamptons, his teenage son goes on trial for murder.
The fans who put Burke's (The Wife, 2018, etc.) last domestic thriller on the bestseller list are going to be happy with this one, a gimmick-free murder mystery with a two-stage surprise ending and uncommonly few credibility-straining plot elements. No double narrator! No unreliable narrator! No handsome psychopaths from central casting! And though there's usually at least one character in this type of book who isn't quite three-dimensional, most of the players here feel like they could have worked in a domestic novel without a murder, which is a kind of test for believability and page-worthiness. The star of the show is Chloe Taylor, a woman's magazine editor-in-chief who has become a hero of the #MeToo movement and a target of misogynist haters on social media. The lumpy area beneath the surface of her smooth, pretty life is the fact that she married her boozy, unstable, maternally incompetent sister's ex-husband and has been raising her nephew, Ethan, as her own son. When his father turns up dead, Ethan tells so many lies about his doings on the evening in question that despite the fact that he's obviously not a murderer, he ends up the No. 1 suspect. As soon as he's arrested, his real mom, Nicky, swoops into town and the sisters form an uneasy and shifting alliance. You'll think you have this thing all figured out, but a series of reveals at the eleventh hour upend those theories. Most of the important people in this novel are women—the head cop, the defense attorney, the judge—and their competent performances create a solid underpinning for the plot.
You'll kill this one fast and be glad you did.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285337-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
Gardner (The Killing Hour, 2003, etc.) tends to overplot, but as always the strength of her characters keeps the pages...
A straight-arrow cop gets entangled with a crooked lady and—surprise!—rues the day.
Bobby Dodge likes his job as a sniper with the Massachusetts State Police Special Tactics squad, a SWAT unit. He likes his girlfriend Susan, a beautiful and talented musician. In short, Bobby likes his life until the night Catherine Gagnon drops into it. What appears at first not much more than a run-of-the-mill domestic disturbance—husband screaming at cowering wife—suddenly escalates when the screaming husband has a gun and the cowering wife is wrapped protectively around a terrified child. There’s no time for anything but trained instinct when Bobby, watching through the scope of his rifle, sees Jimmy Gagnon’s finger tightening on the trigger. It’s a righteous shot, an act that saved the lives of Catherine and her young son, Bobby insists. Most agree at first. In the days that follow, however, minds change. Catherine, it seems, has a past; she also has the kind of beauty that unsettles as readily as it attracts. She’s a dangerous woman, Bobby is warned. Before long, he realizes that as a manipulator she can take her place with the best of history’s dark ladies. And that maybe the shooting wasn’t so righteous after all.
Gardner (The Killing Hour, 2003, etc.) tends to overplot, but as always the strength of her characters keeps the pages turning.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-553-80253-4
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
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