by Adam Mitzner ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 17, 2011
A lukewarm legal tale that only comes alive in the second half.
A debut novel that combines the politics of big law firms, securities fraud and illicit affairs.
Mitzner’s tale follows the story of Alex Miller, who shares the author’s initials and occupation: defense attorney. Miller, married to Elizabeth and father to 5-year-old Charlotte, works for one of those huge law firms that expects its employees to work nearly around the clock. When Alex’s father dies, his father’s closest friend, Michael Ohlig, a wealthy securities trader, asks for Alex’s help. Ohlig expects to be indicted for securities fraud and wants Alex and his firm to represent him. Alex agrees, and Michael ponies up the $2 million retainer. Then beautiful Abby Sloane is assigned to the case as Alex’s second and the situation get predictably complicated from every angle: Alex finds himself drawn to her, the case heats up and things get personal with his mother, who has not been herself since her husband died. When everything starts slipping out of control, Alex faces both a personal challenge and a startling truth. The first half of the book reads like a tutorial on the operation of a big-city law firm. The author goes into dreary detail about every aspect of the securities case, even naming all of the associating attorneys and their clients, despite the fact that most of them never really surface again. Mitzner also has a tendency to over-explain the inner workings of the system from the lawyer’s point of view with the result that the first half reads more like a legal text than a work of fiction. In fact, the first chapters are so weighted down with legalese and filler (every meeting has a buffet, and the author provides a faithful rendition of the food choices) that the story surfaces as an afterthought. It’s not until the Mitzner moves past the securities phase that Alex becomes interesting and the story line picks up speed. Most readers aren’t going to wade through the first part to get to the second, which is a shame because that’s when the real storytelling begins.
A lukewarm legal tale that only comes alive in the second half.Pub Date: May 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5751-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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