Mildly amusing setup for what could be a pleasant series, from attorney-author Liebman (Shark Tales, 2000, etc.).
A couple of criminal lawyers run scared from their clients through the South Jersey underworld.
Camden, N.J., home of Campbell’s Soup, has enough mean guys getting into trouble to keep childhood buddies and former cops Mickie Mezzonatti and Junior “Junne” Salerno busy. The two run a criminal defense practice. As dedicated to their job and their clients as Rumpole, but way, way down market from the British defender, they rent office space from a group of ambulance chasers specializing in spurious disability claims. The two are intellectually matched (both scrambled to pass the bar), agree on ethics (no abetting the clients) and share ethnic roots, but there is a critical division: Mickie is an inveterate womanizer, thrice married, and Junne is gay. He’s as closeted as a televangelist, but he’s out to Mickie, who had a hard time accepting the news and still thinks he might be able to turn things around with the right date. Their current professional dilemma is the demand of new client Rodrigo Gonzalez, a drug lord with unrealistic expectations. He thinks the lawyers should be able to get him out of jail and out of America even though he’s locked up on an iron-clad charge. Rodrigo’s sent his associate to explain to the pair that, should they fail their assignment, they will be dead men, and the associate has in turn sent a pair of thugs to illustrate the point. Only Mickie lost his temper before the thugs could show their stuff and beat one of the pair to a pulp, heightening the tension, already dangerously elevated as far as Junne is concerned. Their only hope is a line of defense made up by their shell-shocked law-school classmate, the class valedictorian who washed out of a white-shoe firm and lost his marbles and his wife.
Mildly amusing setup for what could be a pleasant series, from attorney-author Liebman (Shark Tales, 2000, etc.).Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3527-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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