No rest for Tulsa lawyer Ben Kincaid: his vacation in Arkansas ends with a bang when he's dragooned into defending a white supremacist for the murder of a Vietnamese immigrant—and finds that he's stepped into a minefield of racial hatred. At first the accused, Donald Vick, refuses to say a word to Ben except to insist that he plead him guilty. Circumstances strongly suggest that he's right: as a fourth-generation member of the Anglo- Saxon Patrol (ASP), the defendant was sworn to protect Aryan America from ``gooks'' of whatever stripe—and he'd been in a well-observed fistfight with the victim, Tommy Vuong, in a bar only a few hours before somebody shot Vuong with an ASP crossbow and burned a cross over his dying body. The townsfolk, revolted by ASP's race-baiting, close ranks against Vick so completely that Ben can't even find a place to spend the night; to his disgust he's followed everywhere by an ASP bodyguard ordered to protect him from attacks by the very people who ought to be his natural allies—from brass-knuckled anti- ASP teenager Garth Amick to Belinda Hamilton, founder of Hatewatch. Nor can Ben do much for his client in the courtroom even after he's able to persuade him to change his plea: witness after witness nails the lid down tighter, and when Vick takes the stand, he reveals that under the ASP warpaint, he's just another confused, sensitive man of the 90's—and then takes the fifth as soon as the cross-examination heats up. Is there any hope for such a hopeless defense? Not until after a rash of shootings and firebombings—by equally misguided firebrands from the Vietnamese community and the ASP—and a climactic church blaze that adds every clichÇ of the male gothic to the courtroom intrigue. Ben's well-meaning hardcover debut (after three paperback outings) is broad and crude: a pre-Grisham novel in a world of infinitely shrewder post-Grisham competitors.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-345-38028-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1993
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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