An engrossing, thoughtful, and disturbing drama that caters to fans of constitutional debates.
The First Amendment remains front and center in this legal thriller.
Is a high school flagpole a public forum or an expression of the school’s philosophy of inclusivity with respect to its diverse student body? That is the legal question at the heart of the controversy stirred up when Montpelier High School in Vermont elects to fly the Black Lives Matter flag on its grounds. There are protests by local gun rights group True Patriots. And then the school receives a notice that it is being sued by “Second Amendment, Inc.,” a Virginia gun rights nonprofit funding the Patriots. Enter lawyer Tad Sorowski for the defense. Racist and antisemitic letters and emails are subsequently received by Tad and Sarah Jacobson, the story’s main protagonist, who works for the Green Mountain Black Lives Matter organization. This clash leads to an additional, more intense, First Amendment lawsuit that propels the captivating narrative, with Tad and Sarah filing as the plaintiffs under the “intent to commit” statute. The tale’s opening scene takes place in April 2019, near the story’s conclusion, with the kidnapping of Sarah from a Vermont gas station. She and her boyfriend, Ricky Stillwell, had moved back home to Montpelier from Rhode Island in 2018, when Sarah landed the job working for the Green Mountain Black Lives Matter group. Readers of Lambek’s first novel, Uncivil Liberties(2018), will remember Sarah and Ricky. She was the daughter of that book’s lead attorney, Sam Jacobson, and Ricky was the lawyer’s client. The author toggles between past and present, developing both characters, especially Sarah, and the events leading up to the abduction. These time jumps provide a sense of action in an otherwise more politics- and relationships-driven plotline. Armchair legal eagles will have plenty to chew on here—detailed case histories, precedents, and courtroom maneuvers. But there is also enough personal drama to keep less civically obsessed readers engaged. The cast is comprised of an eclectic group of complex characters with intriguing backstories. And Lambek, a Vermont attorney, is a meticulous writer who stages even relatively minor scenes with the same descriptive precision he uses in his legal arguments.
An engrossing, thoughtful, and disturbing drama that caters to fans of constitutional debates.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-57869-069-5
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.
The eternal jostling for power in Rome and the Vatican is juiced by a development that attracts the attention of the Magellan Billet and its foremost alumnus, Cotton Malone.
Eric Gaetano Casaburi, secretary of Italy’s National Freedom Party, anticipates a decisive victory for the party if Sergio Cardinal Ascolani, the Vatican’s secretary of state, will lend his full-throated support. Of course, the Church isn’t supposed to meddle in contemporary politics, but Eric makes an offer he doesn’t think Ascolani can refuse. Five hundred years ago, Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici loaned Pope Julius II ten million florins the Church never repaid. That debt is still legally payable to anyone who proves to be a surviving member of the Medici family, and Eric believes he can prove exactly that. Although Malone, called in to investigate the bona fides of Ascolani’s enemy Jason Cardinal Richter, has already found a fortune hidden in Richter’s apartment, Richter swears that he’s being framed, and the violent deaths of three anonymous functionaries seem to bear him out. So, Malone forges a series of alliances with Richter, with wealthy businesswoman Camilla Baines, and ultimately with an even more surprising party to prevent Ascolani and Thomas Dewberry, a hired assassin who’s both a sociopath and a devout Catholic, from swaying the upcoming election in return for Eric’s forgiving the ancient debt. An extended closing note shows how inventively Berry mingled history and fiction to weave this tangled web. Readers invested in learning more about the Medicis can be assured that the brief glimpse of them in a prologue set in 1512 is only the beginning.
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538770566
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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