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
How refreshing: a thriller with a narrator who’s almost too reliable.
A widowed Pennsylvania dad hears from his estranged daughter on the occasion of her marriage into the 1 percent.
Frank Szatowski, 52, has achievements he’s proud of: “I started driving young, straight out of the army, and I was recently inducted into the Circle of Honor, an elite group of UPS drivers who’ve worked twenty-five years without an accident.” What Frank doesn’t feel so good about is his relationship with his daughter, Maggie, who cut him off a few years ago when he failed her in some as-yet-unrevealed way. But now the "Unknown Caller" on his phone is her, inviting him to Boston to meet her fiance, Aidan Gardner, and to walk her down the aisle at their wedding. From the moment he steps from the elevator into the penthouse Maggie and Aidan share, Frank feels like a fish out of water, and things only get more uncomfortable when Aidan shows no interest in connecting with his future father-in-law. The wedding is held at a private camp in New Hampshire, exquisitely imagined from the waterfront cottages to the brunch buffets to the 10-foot-high security fence. Even before he’s given a 56-page “privacy doc” to sign and ordered to turn his watch ahead 15 minutes to “Gardner Standard Time,” Frank knows there’s something deeply wrong—for one thing, he’s received a flyer in the mail linking Aidan to a local missing person. But his sister, Tammy, is having the time of her life, as is her 10-year-old foster kid, Abigail, and he’s finally mending fences with Maggie; can’t he just kick back and enjoy? Actually…no. In addition to creating a fun, propulsive plot, Rekulak does a great job on all the status details and supporting characters, from the sleazy family lawyer with his barely legal wife to the younger crowd at the wedding. At the welcome dinner, a woman with “a starfish tattoo and long blond hair braided into ropes” offers Frank an Altoids tin of gummy bears. “These are THC with a little extra wild card,” she tells him encouragingly. Hoo boy. There are some wild cards, all right.
How refreshing: a thriller with a narrator who’s almost too reliable.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781250895783
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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