The weightless style is Woods’, but the smartly engineered complications involving multiple malefactors who plot at serenely...
Perennial bestseller Woods and veteran Hall, who’ve already teamed up to spin a yarn starring Teddy Fay, the ex–CIA operative gone spectacularly rogue (Smooth Operator, 2016), give New York attorney Stone Barrington’s rising-star partner and former client Herbie Fisher a case of his own.
Not that it’s really Herbie’s case. He’s just the lawyer at Woodman & Weld who answers the phone when his colleague James Glick, stricken with appendicitis, is looking for someone, anyone, to take his place in the courtroom and appear on behalf of David Ross, a pre-law student at Columbia caught at a party with a pocketful of cocaine, whose father, a city councilman, has arranged a sweetheart plea bargain that will keep his son out of jail. The plea bargain is authentic, but the appendicitis isn’t: Glick’s desperate to get out from under the demand that he lose the case pronto so that David will go to jail, where vengeful real estate mogul Jules Kenworth can use his vulnerable position to keep putting pressure on the councilman. And the kid, insisting that he’s innocent, refuses to take the deal. So Herbie, who thought he’d be spending 10 minutes in court, ends up cross-examining witnesses whose testimonies he knows nothing about and, in the process, mightily, though unwittingly, angering Tommy Taperelli, the fixer Kenworth has engaged to ensure a guilty verdict. Dazed and confused, Herbie can hardly wait to return to his Park Avenue penthouse to spend some quality time with his fiancee, Yvette Walker, an actress out of the Yale Drama School. Now if only Yvette weren’t really a call girl up to her neck in a scheme to fleece Herbie and leave him at the altar holding the bag….
The weightless style is Woods’, but the smartly engineered complications involving multiple malefactors who plot at serenely oblivious cross-purposes are right out of Hall’s stories about sad-sack private eye Stanley Hastings. Woods, who’s often mysteriously immune to plotting, may have found the perfect partner.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1723-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Coben, who normally has few rivals at keeping the pot boiling (Fool Me Once, 2016, etc.), this time settles for a simmer...
Ten years after a pair of 6-year-olds vanish from a suburban New Jersey home, one of them is spotted in London. But what about the other?
Following an unlikely tip, Windsor Horne Lockwood III spots a boy he’s sure is his missing cousin Rhys Baldwin’s friend Patrick Moore working a rough-trade corner of London’s King’s Cross Station. Their potential reunion is disrupted by a trio of menacing toughs, and by the time Win looks up, the boy has taken off. But Win, whose stacks of old money have still left him powerless to track down Patrick and Rhys for a decade, isn’t about to give up now. He phones an old buddy back in the U.S., sports agent–turned-detective Myron Bolitar (Live Wire, 2011), yanks him away from his fiancee, Terese Collins, once more, and jets him to London. Their inquiries lead the pair to a gamer called Fat Gandhi, who demands 100,000 pounds for each of the boys—a discount price, considering that the million-dollar ransom Rhys’ father, hedge fund manager Chick Baldwin, dropped off 10 years ago led nowhere. Following an unexpectedly crooked road, Myron and Win eventually flush out Patrick again, and his now-divorced parents instantly spirit him back home. Their rejoicing is muted, though, by the continued absence of Rhys, which Chick and his wife, Brooke, feel all the more keenly because the Moores erect a protective wall of silence around Patrick. Even when Myron’s nephew Mickey and his goth girlfriend, Ema Wyatt, figure out a way to get him to open up, he has nothing to add to the Finnish au pair’s tale of the kidnapping. Is it possible the rescued boy isn’t even Patrick?
Coben, who normally has few rivals at keeping the pot boiling (Fool Me Once, 2016, etc.), this time settles for a simmer until unleashing his trademark twists late in the proceedings. This one is for fans with even more patience than the parents of those kidnapped boys.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-95510-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Not as intense as Goldin’s blistering debut, The Escape Room (2018), but a remarkably strong contender for second place.
A podcast investigator covering her first present-tense criminal trial is thrown for a loop by a radical new development in a much older case.
Now that she has two successful seasons of Guilty or Not Guilty under her belt, Rachel Krall is ready to turn from reopening old cases to following one as it unfolds in real time. Champion swimmer Scott Blair is about to be tried for the rape and sexual battery of Kelly Moore, who attends the high school he graduated from the year before. Prosecutor Mitchell Alkins and rock-star defense attorney Dale Quinn agree that the two teenagers had sex on the night in question, but they don’t agree whether it was consensual. So Rachel’s come to Neapolis, North Carolina, to attend the trial, prepare daily summaries of every twist and turn, and assure her listeners that every broadcast “puts you in the jury box.” As the trial proceeds through an unsparing barrage of she-said, he-said testimony, Rachel finds the objectivity she’s promised her listeners increasingly compromised by her growing sympathy for Kelly. A far more serious complication begins even before the trial with a furtive series of notes from Hannah Stills, whose older sister, Jenny, was raped, beaten, and drowned back in 1992. Certain that her sister’s assailant, who’s never been punished or identified, will be present in the courtroom, Hannah writes that she’s finally ready to reopen her own painful past and reveal knowledge about her sister’s last night that she’s never shared with anyone else. But though Hannah begs for Rachel’s help, she fails to show up at every meeting she proposes, leaving Rachel to wonder whether she’s really a will-of-the-wisp—and incidentally, what these two assaults a generation apart could possibly have to do with each other.
Not as intense as Goldin’s blistering debut, The Escape Room (2018), but a remarkably strong contender for second place.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21968-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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