The shifting nature of truth and the difference between appearance and reality are the themes of a nicely crafted legal thriller by author/attorney Harrington (Endgame in Berlin, 1991). Alexandria seems like your basic quaint Ohio Valley town peopled with rustics who belong to the Rotary and Kiwanis, shoot deer in the forest, and pray at night to preserve property values from strangers. But then Alexandria gets caught up in the sensational trial of Park Avenue socialite/art dealer Marietta Rheinlander, accused of murdering her congressman lover, Charles Bailey, and two aides at his rural retreat. The 40-year-old Rheinlander, portrayed via Harrington's documentary, pro-and-con style as a second-tier Vanity Fair cheesecake, is the only stereotyped character in a multilayered story narrated by aging trial judge Bill McIntyre, who was born and reared in Alexandria and comes across as a judiciously fair man. He's also the deus ex machina of the plot, guiding readers through points of law and a pantheon of mainly WASP-named players. McIntyre makes it plain at the outset that the case against Rheinlander seems open and shut: Not only was she spotted standing over Bailey's body with a smoking .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, which bears her fingerprints, she was also observed fleeing the death scene in her rented red Oldsmobile. Will this rich, sophisticated New Yorker receive justice in a locale that appears to celebrate the opinions of Dan Quayle? In the rather contrived ending, she does—but not before homegrown county prosecutor Ken Simpson catches Rheinlander in a lie about the number of times she was forced to perform fellatio on the bachelor congressman, whom big-city defense lawyer Lloyd George Kimball suggests was gay and could have been murdered by a homosexual lover wearing gloves. The pacing is like a brisk tennis match as arguments go back and forth in Harrington's gripping take on reasonable doubt.
Pub Date: May 18, 1994
ISBN: 1-55611-393-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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