Choctaw, Alabama, May 1962. Ben Wade, now the town's respected doctor, looks back from a generation later to the events that led up to a savage attack on golden Kelli Troy atop the local landmark Breakheart Hill. He recalls her arrival from Baltimore the autumn before as a high-school senior, traces her stint as coeditor with him of the school newspaper, describes the passion for civil rights that a demonstration in neighboring Gadsden awoke in her, and lingers over his own awakening to a hopeless love. This march toward calamity is punctuated by flash- forwards to the day of the attack, the police investigation, and the years beyond, creating a disturbingly three-dimensional view of the town and the high-schoolers who thought their every trivial gesture would live foreverand now find that it has. If the pace of Ben's reminiscences is a little too measured, even at times becalmed, there are ample rewards in the mingled mourning, horror, and genuine affection with which he recaptures the past. Cook (Mortal Memory, 1993, etc.) uses the what-will-have- happened structure of Barbara Vine's thrillers to produce something finer and more delicate, with an altogether less insistent narrative pull.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-09651-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
Yes, it’s formula. Yes, it’s not as gritty an exercise in swamp mayhem as Hiaasen, Buchanan, or Crews might turn in. But,...
“I started dreaming of getting rich, which, in Florida anyway, can lead to serious trouble”: another blockbuster in the making from Grisham (Rogue Lawyer, 2015, etc.), the ascended master of the legal procedural.
If justice is blind, it is also served, in theory, by incorruptible servants. Emphasize “in theory,” for as Grisham’s latest opens, judicial investigator Lacy Stoltz is confronted with the unpleasant possibility that a highly regarded judge may be on the take. The charge comes, discreetly, from a former lawyer–turned-jailbird-turned-lawyer again, who spins out a seemingly improbable tale of racketeering that weds the best elements of Gulf Coast society with the worst, from the brilliant legal minds of Tallahassee to some very unpleasant lads once styled as the Catfish Mafia, now reborn in an alt-version, the Coast Mafia. Lacy’s brief is to find out just how rotten the rotten judge is—and the answer is plenty. Naturally, this knowledge is not acquired without cost; the body count rises, bad things happen to good people, and for a time, at least, the villains get away with murder and more. Grisham has never been strong on characterization: Lacy, we learn, is content to be single, “to live alone, to sleep in the center of the bed, to clean up only after herself,” and so forth, but beyond that the reader doesn’t get much sense of what drives her to put herself in the way of flying bullets and sneering counsel: “His associate was Ian Archer, an unsmiling sort who refused to shake hands with anyone and reeked of surliness.” In laid-back Florida? Indeed, and in Grisham’s busy hands, a lot of players come and go, some fated to sleep with the manatees.
Yes, it’s formula. Yes, it’s not as gritty an exercise in swamp mayhem as Hiaasen, Buchanan, or Crews might turn in. But, like eating a junk burger, even though you probably shouldn’t, it’s plenty satisfying.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-54119-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Though the novel eventually begins to sag under the weight of all its plot elements, fans of the psychological thriller will...
A pathological liar, a woman in a coma, a childhood diary, an imaginary friend, an evil sister—this is an unreliable-narrator novel with all the options.
"A lot of people would think I have a dream job, but nightmares are dreams too." Was it only a week ago Amber Reynolds thought her job as an assistant radio presenter was a nightmare? Now it's Dec. 26 (or Boxing Day, because we're in England), and she's lying in a hospital bed seemingly in a coma, fully conscious but unable to speak or move. We won't learn what caused her condition until the end of the book, and the journey to that revelation will be complicated by many factors. One: She doesn't remember her accident. Two: As she confesses immediately, "Sometimes I lie." Three: It's a story so complicated that even after the truth is exposed, it will take a while to get it straight in your head. As Amber lies in bed recalling the events of the week that led to her accident, several other narrative threads kick up in parallel. In the present, she's visited in her hospital room by her husband, a novelist whose affections she has come to doubt. Also her sister, with whom she shares a dark secret, and a nasty ex-boyfriend whom she ran into in the street the week before. He works as a night porter at the hospital, giving him unfortunate access to her paralyzed but not insensate body. Interwoven with these sections are portions of a diary, recounting unhappy events that happened 25 years earlier from a 9-year-old child's point of view. Feeney has loaded her maiden effort with possibilities for twists and reveals—possibly more than strictly necessary—and they hit like a hailstorm in the last third of the book. Blackmail, forgery, secret video cameras, rape, poisoning, arson, and failing to put on a seat belt all play a role.
Though the novel eventually begins to sag under the weight of all its plot elements, fans of the psychological thriller will enjoy this ambitious debut.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-14484-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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