Middling in-and-out-of-courtroom drama, but a superior example of contemporary muckraking.
Patterson, who’s evidently never met a legal issue he couldn’t turn into page-turning fiction, takes on the vexed problem of capital punishment.
The evidence against Rennell Price and his drug-wholesaler brother Payton was overwhelming. A neighbor saw the two of them pull nine-year-old Thuy Sen off the street as she walked home from her Bayview school. Traces of hair, semen, and saliva were found in the house where they lived with their grandmother and in the trunk of the car belonging to Payton’s lieutenant, Eddie Fleet, who in due course testified that he’d helped them dump the body into San Francisco Bay. As if the facts weren’t damning enough, their lawyer was a self-confessed incompetent who took the case (thriftily bundling their defenses together) in order to support his crack habit. Following their swift convictions, the Prices have sat for 15 years on Death Row as their appeals ground through the system. Now Teresa Paget is handling Rennell’s final appeal as the clock ticks down. Patterson (Balance of Power, 2003, etc.) cunningly doles out hopeful new developments in the tiniest increments imaginable as Terri, her stepson Carlo Paget, and their habeas corpus team prepare round after round of their appeal, laboring under the draconian strictures of the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and eventually working their way up to the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Caroline Masters (The Final Judgment, 1995). Throughout their legal travails on behalf of a defendant Terri believes is both retarded and innocent, Patterson miraculously keeps the most recondite political, moral, and philosophical issues clear. But he’s less successful in creating three-dimensional characters to incarnate these dilemmas. The result is one of those rare thrillers whose most exciting parts—and there are plenty of them—are its most abstract legal arguments.
Middling in-and-out-of-courtroom drama, but a superior example of contemporary muckraking.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-45019-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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