A thoughtful, well-drawn legal thriller with teen tribulation at its center.
Kemanis (Love & Crimes, 2017, etc.) sets an intrepid prosecutor up against some high school drama with deadly consequences in this latest Dana Hargrove legal thriller.
Westchester County, New York, 2009: The new district attorney, Hargrove, takes office just as the adverse effects of the Great Recession—unemployment, domestic abuse, increased levels of substance abuse—start to take hold in her jurisdiction. Then the frozen body of a teen suicide is discovered in the Hudson River; it’s Naomi Steuben, a shy, overweight girl who’d recently been the victim of vicious online bullying by two classmates. Her grieving parents pressure the DA’s office to deliver justice, and Hargrove and her team must figure out how to prosecute the case without any cyberbullying laws on the books. As the attorneys—Hargrove; her husband, Evan Goodhue; and their rival Vesma Krumins—struggle to work within the law, the Hargroves’ kids, Travis and Natalie Goodhue, and Vesma’s daughter, Ginger, endure the petty and sometimes-harmful world of high school. Natalie is forced to testify against her peers, which has consequences for her entire family. Hargrove may not be able to keep her kids safe from the world’s tragedies, but she’ll do whatever she can to make sure justice is served. Kemanis writes in a style that adeptly dramatizes legal arguments while also finding moments of stark lyricism, as when she describes the moment just before Naomi’s wintry death: “With all physical sensation gone, the rest of it is now almost a memory, not even that. The remaining bits float away into the vast, sucking expanse of black sky over the river.” Although court cases figure heavily into the novel’s plot, the author manages to transcend the genre somewhat by delving so deeply into the lives of the teenage characters and their social circle. The result is a novel about how communities contend with their children’s coming-of-age, particularly in an era when technology is shifting the ground beneath everyone’s feet.
A thoughtful, well-drawn legal thriller with teen tribulation at its center.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9997850-0-3
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Opus Nine Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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