Nothing innovative here, but Hettche manipulates the genre’s conventions, and the reader’s pulse rate, with enviable skill.
A possible miscarriage of justice drives the busy plot of this complex legal thriller, the first English-translated work of a popular German author.
Hans Arbogast, a married traveling salesman whose brief sexual encounter with a female hitchhiker resulted in her death, is convicted in 1953 of second-degree murder. Did Marie Gurth, a former resident of an East German refugee camp, die of strangulation?—or, as Arbogast ingenuously alleged, of natural causes following rough sex? It’s only after Arbogast has spent 16 years in Bruchsal Penitentiary that crime-novelist and human-rights activist Fritz Sarrazin and attorney Ansgar Klein manage to get the case reopened. All turns on whether an overzealous prosecutor coerced Arbogast’s confession and a prosecution witness willfully obscured details of an autopsy report that noted in the deceased woman’s body “a weakened condition as a result of a partial abortion.” (This is all based on a notorious real case.) Hettche maintains a brisk pace throughout, juxtaposing Arbogast’s prison experiences and confused memories of his misadventure with the actions of a host of involved legal, criminal, and forensic authorities. The result is a convincing cross-section of postwar German society, and the tantalizing implication that divisions among Hans Arbogast’s accusers and defenders parallel Berlin’s awkward status as a divided city. Sarrazin and Klein are absorbing characters, and the enigma of Arbogast continually deepens, particularly during his explosive retrial testimony. Hettche stumbles with the character of forensic pathologist Katja Lavans, whose interest in the case becomes more than clinical. But he rekindles interest smartly in the closing pages, in which the “accident” that caused Marie Gurth’s death is speculatively declared “an eruption . . . a vestige from the war that suddenly discharged.”
Nothing innovative here, but Hettche manipulates the genre’s conventions, and the reader’s pulse rate, with enviable skill.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-13812-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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