As usual, Clark plots as generously as her Scandinavian counterparts, though neither the stalwart regular cast nor the...
A third case that adds still more evidence for Los Angeles attorney Samantha Brinkman’s default attitude toward her criminal-defense practice: “I pretty much assume all my clients are guilty.”
Pushed beyond endurance by her manically possessive boyfriend, Roan Sutton, USC freshman Alicia Hutchins voicemails him a Dear John message, but it’s too late: soon after she realizes he’s converted her nude selfies to revenge porn, she’s found in her bathtub with her throat slashed. Would Brinkman & Associates defend Sutton on a possible murder charge? “Not if we were starving and living in Tent City,” Samantha tells Alex Medrano, her investigator. In fact, she’s already lost her chance, for shortly after the LAPD identifies the spurned lover as a person of interest, he too is found dead, an apparent suicide—unless it’s murder, as his mother, Audrey Sutton, says early and often to any media flack who’ll listen. Alicia’s father, noted attorney Graham Hutchins, wants Samantha to defend him against possible homicide charges, but he’d be better off if she could just prevent him from responding to Audrey’s charges in self-destructive ways that stoke the fires of public opinion. Nor is he Samantha’s only problem client. Uber-ganglord Javier Cabazon, to whom she owes a serious favor (Moral Defense, 2016), politely demands that she locate Tracy Gopeck, the primary witness against Cabazon’s nephew for killing a rival gangbanger, so that Cabazon’s goons can liquidate her. It won’t be easy to find someone who’s been taken into protective custody, and even if it were, Samantha can’t condone turning her over to Cabazon’s tender mercies. But it’s as hard to say no to the fearsome Cabazon as it is to stem the tide of public opinion.
As usual, Clark plots as generously as her Scandinavian counterparts, though neither the stalwart regular cast nor the interchangeable suspects are interesting enough to keep up the tension for almost 500 pages.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4599-5
Page Count: 459
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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
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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