A remarkable and compelling courtroom drama.
In Ferguson’s legal thriller, a deputy district attorney must navigate an unexpectedly twisty case.
After college sophomore Haylee Branch is found raped and strangled at her friend Jacinta Cantrell’s father’s mansion in a Northern California suburb, the police immediately arrest a young man named Andrew Rodarte. He tells police that he was at the scene of the crime that night, but that he left before Haylee was killed. Enter John Patrick Howland, a deputy district attorney who narrates much of the novel (along with police detective Mark Wade and Haylee’s mother, Marta). Gradually, Rodarte’s story begins to crumble. He admits at trial to killing Haylee, but says it was a tragic outcome of consensual rough sex; nonetheless, he’s found guilty of first-degree murder and gets a sentence of 25 years to life. That should have been the end of the story—an outcome that provides at least some comfort to the victim’s loved ones. But about a decade later, Rodarte files a habeas corpus plea that offers a new account of events that, amazingly, becomes more believable as the cops and the lawyers dig into it. Readers, too, will find the new development to be quite credible and realistic. The book takes readers all the way to the end of the knotty case, showing that justice can be a very messy thing—a concept that gradually reveals itself to be the novel’s overarching theme.
Ferguson presents his readers with a story that begins as a relatively straightforward Law & Order-style procedural, but soon takes the reader on a ride that turns out to be much wilder than your average TV mystery. The author has nearly two decades of experience as an attorney in Southern California, and his deep knowledge of court proceedings is on full display through his novel’s many twists and turns. His trial scenes show his keen eye for detail, but also showcase his ability to take things at a very slow pace when necessary. At another point, Ferguson presents a speech at a parole hearing that’s a masterpiece of tempered emotion and hard-earned wisdom. His greatest strength as a writer, however, is characterization; his players come across as real people caught up in real lives, and readers are likely to find themselves affected by their tribulations. The author treats his main character, Howland, with especially keen sensitivity, showing him to be a good man who’s far more capable than he gives himself credit for. Certainly, the lawyer would make a fine companion for someone—and on the final page, readers get a hint that that might happen. He also shows a distinct talent for shifting readers’ perceptions by taking characters’ stories in unexpected directions. The prose also shows impressive wit at times, as when defense attorney Ted Stauber is described as caught off guard, “like a cowboy on a skateboard”; at another point, the same attorney is said to look “ready to complete the trial by murdering his client.”
A remarkable and compelling courtroom drama.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2023
ISBN: 9798394718434
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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