A relentlessly paced legal drama that ably chronicles a city’s past racial tensions.
A historical novel dramatizes a defense attorney’s perilous stand against judicial corruption in Brooklyn.
Troy Jackson is an unusual candidate for a murder suspect—a clean-cut black guidance counselor with a relatively clean criminal record, he owns a home in Brooklyn with his pregnant wife. Nevertheless, he’s arrested for the killing of Menachem Mendel Bernstein, a crime committed seven years ago, on the strength of highly questionable eyewitness testimony. Troy’s wife contacts Ken Williams, a black defense attorney with a reputation for championing the fair judicial treatment of African-Americans in New York City. Meanwhile, Williams has already taken on the case of Jojo Jones, a black inmate who was convicted of the murder of Bernstein’s father, a rabbi, 16 years earlier. Jones was found guilty—without any physical evidence—on the basis of testimony that is revealed to be the fruit of brazen coercion. The deeper Williams digs into the case, the more clearly he discerns a disturbing pattern of widespread corruption on the parts of District Attorney James Neary and Anthony Racanelli, his top prosecutor. And once Williams is able to successfully win Jones’ freedom, mortifying Neary and Racanelli, they respond by arresting him for the assault of a police officer and getting his law license temporarily suspended. Pushed to the brink and filled with rage, Williams decides to challenge Neary for his position and runs for district attorney, a decision quickly followed by death threats and the bombing of his office, which kills Jones. Block (Disrobed: An Inside Look at the Life and Work of a Federal Trial Judge, 2012)—a U.S. district judge who has spent nearly a quarter century on the bench—vividly depicts a city roiled by racial tensions and a district attorney’s office cravenly eager to kowtow to its Jewish campaign donors. The novel does double duty as history, skillfully recounting New York’s race riots and their lasting effects as well as some of the city’s most incendiary scandals. The writing is crisp if less than literary, but the story—closely based on the life of lawyer Ken Thompson, the first black district attorney of Brooklyn—is as gripping as any fictional crime tale.
A relentlessly paced legal drama that ably chronicles a city’s past racial tensions.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59079-438-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: SelectBooks
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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