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
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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