Compelling characters fuel this briskly paced legal thriller.
In this fourth installment of Bequette’s mystery series, a lawyer defends an autistic teen who’s on trial for murder.
San Francisco defense attorney Joe Turner’s latest case takes him down south to Barton, Georgia. He’s there on behalf of his investigator, Chuck Argenal, whose 18-year-old nephew is accused of fatally shooting the small town’s high school quarterback. There’s quite a bit of evidence (though no discernible motive) implicating Carl Ledbetter, who’s on the autistic spectrum (“tracking other people’s emotions is just too intense, too overwhelming for him. So he avoids eye contact, social cues, and buries himself in his own thoughts”); a witness claims to have seen him on the night of the murder, and Carl tested positive for gunshot residue. Locals, who practically worship their high school football team, are wary of Joe’s presence, since he’s an outsider. He gets the most flak from the judge trying Carl’s case and from the prosecuting district attorney. They seem convinced of the teen’s guilt and determined to close the case quickly, presumably before the town gets too deep into the new football season. Luckily, Joe has skilled people on his side: Chuck, unsurprisingly, takes on the investigator role to help his nephew, and Joe’s archaeologist girlfriend, Eddy Busier, comes for a visit and lends a hand, doing some investigating of her own. The trio’s most pressing objective is unmasking the culprit, which entails identifying suspects and checking to see if their individual alibis hold up. At trial, Joe must dispute the evidence and show the jury what he sees: an innocent kid who’s looking at serious time behind bars.
Bequette’s legal narrative moves briskly, thanks to succinct chapters that bounce the story from scene to scene. The novel employs a narrative structure that ramps up suspense; scenes of Joe working the case are intercut with the nine-person jury deliberating post-closing arguments and flashbacks from before and the night of the murder. The jury scenes are especially good, showcasing assorted personalities stuck in one room, including a blatantly offensive and bigoted juror. Carl occasionally narrates, too, and provides welcome insight into a thought process that may seem unorthodox to some readers (in one scene, someone bumps into him and angrily says, “Watch yourself,” which confuses Carl, who takes everything literally). The story’s nonlinear mingling of scenes is easy to follow and maintains the mystery for much of the novel (the jurors don’t spoil moments from the trial that readers haven’t yet encountered). Joe is a likable series hero; there’s no question he’s an accomplished lawyer who fights hard for his clients. His believable flaws make him appealing as he struggles to retain his cool in the courtroom (he isn’t always successful) and his legal tactics sometimes fail miserably. As the narrative unfolds, so do several surprises, from crucial information a particular character chooses to withhold to an unexpected revelation regarding a potential suspect. There are a handful of viable murderers, making it difficult to pinpoint who definitely did the deed—the story culminates with a doozy of an ending.
Compelling characters fuel this briskly paced legal thriller.Pub Date: March 12, 2026
ISBN: 9781685137250
Page Count: 339
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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