Jessica Mitchell, a new reporter on Alex Collier's Channel 7 Twin Cities news team (Savage Justice, 1992), goes off on her own to find out the truth about the murder of accused rapist Edward Hill—and uncovers a vigilante court of last resort for the victims of sex offenders. Forging an unlikely alliance with Captain Bill Meecham, the half- retired, half-drunk head of Homicide, Jessica links Hill's death to several other unsolved homicides of rapists and child molesters in the Twin Cities area. The culprits are the members of the Craft Club, women who've been denied justice in the courts and are now taking the law into their own hands. In the hands of a subtler moralist, the pivotal Craftswoman would be Hennepin County prosecutor Sarah Andrews, who is inflamed by a justice system that winks at the likes of alleged molester Lowell Ingram and lets him off without a day of prison time, but who's still reluctant to countenance the Craft Club's extreme- prejudice reprisals. Handberg wavers in this direction when the Club kidnaps and humiliates Ingram, who starts to feed information to Jessica even as he's threatening Sarah with counter-revenge for her revenge. Mainly, though, Handberg chooses to focus instead on Lt. Freda Brinkman, an over-the-top rogue cop who's both Meecham's right- hand investigator and the Club's least conscience-stricken dispenser of summary justice. The battle of wits between Jessica and Brinkman stays on a cartoon level as Brinkman stalks Jessica, arranges an accident for Meecham, and plans to kidnap Jessica along with Sarah's weak-link roommate—rape victim Kim Hawkins (``an open, bleeding wound'')—while Jessica, with eligible rookie prosecutor Jack Tomlinson, closes in on the Channel 7 exclusive that will shut down the Craft Club for good. Connect-the-dots suspense, with a subtext about vigilante justice that's too crude and confused to be truly insulting.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55972-201-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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