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
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
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