by William J. Coughlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 1992
Recovering alcoholic Charley Sloan (Shadow of a Doubt, 1991, etc.), lowest rung of the Detroit bar, juggles three juicy cases as he struggles to keep from falling off the wagon. Charley's just lost the first case—his defense of alleged euthanasiast Miles Stewart (``Doctor Death'')—but the presiding judge allowed so much inadmissible evidence that Charley's confident of winning the appeal. In the meantime, however, the charmless doctor keeps making trips out of town, one of which ends with an elderly, ailing corpse and a $200,000 contribution to his research foundation. After Charley ruthlessly presses for an out-of-court settlement to the second case—former prostitute Becky Harris's rape/assault suit against her sometime boyfriend, car salesman Howard Wordley—Becky decides to kiss and make up with Wordley, leaving Charley way out on a limb with the folks he's been intimidating. But it's the third case that's the killer. Arguing the appeal of a product liability suit—a mobile home mysteriously accelerated on its own, leaving driver Will McHugh hopelessly crippled, and seedy, conscientious attorney-of- record Mickey Monk on the verge of bankruptcy—Charley gets a series of deafening hints from sleazy former judge Jeffrey Mallow that the appeal will go in his client's favor if only he's willing to slip a substantial bribe to Judge William Palmer, the revered law-school mentor who had kept Charley from disbarment a few years back. Unwilling to finger Palmer (whose insistent daughter he's just started to date) and unable to back out of the case (Palmer and Mallow have threatened to discredit him if he doesn't come across), Charley's in a three-ring pickle. It's a pleasure watching the well-oiled machinery—politics, threats, and shameless legal maneuvering—that eventually brings Charley to a perfect three-point landing.
Pub Date: Oct. 7, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-017701-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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