An engaging Mafia story spiked with some surprises.
An ambitious prosecutor and a newbie mob attorney face off in this debut legal thriller.
After three years working as a lawyer in the Palm Beach County Public Defender’s Office in Florida, 29-year-old Jason Noble is burned out. “Being an assistant public defender is like working in dog years,” he tells his boss. And Jason knows a lot about canines, as his English bulldog, Caesar, is his constant companion at home and on business-related road trips. After Jason opens his own law practice, business is initially slow. But things heat up after mobster Antonio “Magic Man”Barrera, charged with three counts of murder, is advised by one of “the best lawyers in the country” that it’s an unwinnable case. The lawyer, Peter “the Great” Cohen, suggests hiring an inexperienced former public defender so “Ineffective Assistance of Counsel” can ultimately be proved. Enter Jason, who will spar with prosecutor Trevor Wittingham, a gubernatorial candidate running in a special election. Wittingham believes the conviction of a reputed mob boss will ensure his ascent “to the governor’s mansion,” so he’s willing to do whatever it takes to win the case. In Morse’s story, verbal and physical cruelty—a wife continually berating her husband; trafficked victims suffering before being killed; a mobster getting mutilated before being thrown to the gators—piles on to the point of diminishing returns. Mobspeak—including terms such as “fuhgeddaboudit”—lifted from B gangster films sounds clichéd. Nicknames are overused—to name a few: Vinnie “The Bag” Respi, Mario “Lug Nut” Rizzo, and attorney Tim “Butt-Kisser” Barnes.There’s nothing woke about the female characters: sex workers, crabby wives, and “doe-eyed” stunners. But courtroom scenes read authentically, and the author knows the South Florida area, citing, for example, “The Chart Room, where Truman Capote penned his final novel and Jimmy Buffett and Bob Marley played their first gigs.” A courtroom reveal and an unexpected ending are more than satisfying.
An engaging Mafia story spiked with some surprises.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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