An effective and engaging legal tale about the trial of an abused wife.
A debut courtroom novel focuses on a murder case based on a true story.
Bob Nichols, the narrator of Steadman’s book, opens this tale while sitting on his deck in Flint, Michigan, in 1987. He’s thinking back to the case that made his career back in October 1956, when his old high school sweetheart, Betty, walked into the offices of his fledgling law practice in the town of Darien with a horrifying confession: She killed her husband, Sam Waterman. Nichols had been on the same football team as Sam when they were younger, and he was extremely familiar with the rocky state of Betty’s marriage. Sam “had brutalized her during the last three years of their marriage,” he recalls, “with the full knowledge and support of his dad, Ira.” Fearing for her own life and the safety of her little daughter, Betty had drawn a shotgun from underneath Sam’s bed and shot him dead while he slept. Nichols knew instantly that he had a “cause” case on his hands—and also an uphill battle to make the argument that Betty was acting in self-defense even though her victim was asleep when she killed him. As the trial got under way and the witnesses and publicity began turning Betty’s already unhappy life upside down, tender feelings began to rekindle between Nichols and his client. Steadman, who was the defense attorney in the real-world trial, works all of these elements into a narrative that positively crackles with authenticity. Through his main character’s reflections on events in Darien, Steadman captures perfectly many of the aspects of small-town living, where everybody went to the same high school and knows one another’s business. And through the slow, step-by-step dramatization of the trial, the author wonderfully elicits the workaday, real-world lessons of a career in the law. Steadman deftly escalates the drama both inside and outside the courtroom, and the display of his legal skills in the former setting neatly counterbalances the simple sweetness of how he handles the latter.
An effective and engaging legal tale about the trial of an abused wife.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-954786-52-3
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Mission Point Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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