A masterful mix of legal arcana and white-knuckle suspense, with a dollop of dirty pork-barrel politicking for good measure.
Two brothers and a murder are at the heart of this fine, meaty legal thriller from circuit-court judge Clark (Plain Heathen Mischief, 2004, etc.).
The author’s latest, based on one of his own cases, is set in his small hometown: Stuart, Va. It begins in 1984. Gates Hunt is 27 and his kid brother Mason is 24. Their father Curt, mean as they come, used to wallop them mercilessly; he made life hell for his long-suffering wife Sadie Grace, too, before finally disappearing. Gates had protected Mason, hence the “visceral, epic connection” between the brothers. That explains why the decent, hardworking Mason covers for the shiftless Gates when he shoots another man dead. The victim had been fooling around with Gates’s girlfriend, and there was a late-night confrontation on a deserted country road, Mason the only witness. He gets rid of the gun and the case goes cold. Years pass. The no-good Gates is busted for selling drugs to an undercover state cop and draws a long prison term. Mason becomes a successful lawyer in Richmond and marries; he and wife Allison are a devoted couple. He returns to Stuart as an attorney; then Allison is killed in a car crash, leaving Mason to raise their daughter alone. It’s not until 2003 that the murder case is reopened. Gates, desperate and hoping for a pardon, accuses Mason of the crime; a special prosecutor is appointed, and Mason is indicted. Clark ratchets up the drama with two electrifying scenes: Sadie Grace smiting and disowning her son, and the brothers, by now the bitterest of enemies, slugging each other. Clark’s key point is the potential gap between the law and true justice, into which a good person can fall. Ultimately, everything pivots on an obscure Latin writ.
A masterful mix of legal arcana and white-knuckle suspense, with a dollop of dirty pork-barrel politicking for good measure.Pub Date: July 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26835-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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