A gripping legal thriller pitting a cheating husband against a cheating wife.
A sordid divorce case leads to violence and an explosive courtroom trial.
The latest Florida-based legal thriller by Mills (The Objector, 2016, etc.) begins with a confrontation all too familiar in the litigious 21st century: an acrimonious divorce. Dr. Stan Jacoby makes an unexpected return home from a golfing vacation to surprise his wife of seven years, Karen, with an expensive gift. Relations have been tense between them lately, since Karen discovered affairs Stan had been carrying on. Turnabout becomes fair play: when he gets back home, he walks in on her in flagrante delicto with another man. Mutually incensed, they proceed to court, where Karen is represented by divorce attorney Beth Mancini, who quickly comes to enjoy her client’s tart tongue and friendly nature. When Beth asks Karen what traits she desires in her next husband, she replies: “I want him to be closer to my age. He doesn’t need to be as rich as Stan, but I still want financial security. And most importantly, he can’t be an asshole, like Stan.” The two take a break from legal tensions at Karen’s beach cottage, where they’re confronted by an armed, masked attacker they naturally assume is Stan. In the resulting criminal trial, long-suppressed secrets from both sides of the aisle get dragged into the open. As in his previous novel, Mills effectively moves his plot along—this is a genuine page-turner despite sometimes-pedestrian writing on the line-by-line level. Two of the tale’s atmospheric staples, the Florida setting and the give-and-take of a courtroom, are confidently, vividly realized throughout. Mills is especially adept at capturing a sense of place, no mean feat even in a state as oft-chronicled as Florida. The natural, unforced picture he paints of the sometimes-spiky, uneven friendship between Karen and Beth is the most memorably written strand of the story and makes the tense, final-act revelations and plot twists feel grounded. The climactic courtroom sequences are well-served by the author’s experience in the Florida legal world; they not only feel entirely believable, but crackle with dramatic energy as well. The tricks of those scenes—unexpected rulings from the bench, surprise revelations on the witness stand, etc.—should be familiar to any reader who’s seen a Law & Order repeat on TV, but Mills makes them his own.
A gripping legal thriller pitting a cheating husband against a cheating wife.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5194-0439-8
Page Count: 422
Publisher: Pono Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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