Gold and O’Clare have their charm, but they tread the same old legal-thriller ground as ever, and busy readers might...
Boston attorneys Gold and O’Clare (Uncommon Justice, 2001) for the defense again, this time to help their favorite gangster client beat a murder rap.
Gold’s a middle-aged Jew, O’Clare a female Irish-American Catholic; their office manager is a female African-American; and their chief investigator is an Italian-American ex-homicide cop, recently out of the closet. All this diversity is crammed into the little law firm that could—could beat legal behemoths of every description, that is, because its collective heart is pure and its store of energy boundless. These are qualities that remain intact even in behalf of an unmitigated slob like Big Ben Friedman, even when the murder that this notorious racketeer stands charged with is particularly nasty, the arranged killing of a child. Gold and O’Clare get him off, all right, but their victory is tainted by what has the appearance, at least, of jury tampering. The eponymous Juror #11, hot-looking Conchita Balaguer, has spent a disproportionate amount of trial-time gazing significantly at Mairead O’Clare, who has found the attention both mystifying and unsettling. The prosecution, however, considers it a dead giveaway: Conchita’s been bribed, it seems clear to ADA Jim Seagraves, hot-looking in his own way though dimwitted and bombastic as fictional prosecutors so often are. The trial ends. Mairead, in her office, prepping for her next win, is interrupted by a phone call. Conchita wants to hire her, Mairead learns to her astonishment, and there’s big money in the offer. Agreeing to meet at Conchita’s house, Mairead arrives to find her prospective client strung from the beam of a cathedral ceiling. Naturally, ADA Seagraves fingers bad Big Ben for this crime, too, but after multiple plot- and sub-plot twists, not a few of them extraneous, the little law firm that could, does.
Gold and O’Clare have their charm, but they tread the same old legal-thriller ground as ever, and busy readers might entertain a motion to dismiss.Pub Date: June 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14886-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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