A sinister cult, political payoffs, hard-core sex tapes, stories about child abuse and one of the most stressed-out...
Not content with ruining a Los Angeles law firm financially, a powerful religious cult now seems intent on killing off the firm’s former partners.
Parker Stern was never close to Richard Baxter, and when Rich left Macklin & Cherry and took the lucrative business of the Church of the Sanctified Assembly with him, bringing the firm to its knees, Parker wrote him off. But he can’t refuse to take on his defense when Rich phones him from prison after the Assembly accuses him of embezzling millions—even though Parker’s had an incapacitating case of situational glossophobia that’s prevented him from speaking in court ever since the suicide of his mentor, Harmon Cherry, several weeks ago. When Rich, a former true believer who’s made wild accusations concerning the Assembly’s own sins and insisted that Harmon Cherry was murdered to cover them up, misses his initial court appearance because he’s apparently hanged himself in his cell, Parker wonders if two suicides are two too many—whether both Harmon and Rich were murdered by agents of the Assembly. And when Rich’s father, Raymond, hit by the Assembly with a multimillion-dollar suit over Rich’s estate, asks Parker to take the case, he hands him the perfect base from which to launch his assault against oily PR chief Christopher McCarthy, hired legal gun Louis Frantz, film star–turned-Congressman Lake Knolls and everyone else in LA County. But first-timer Rotstein, an entertainment lawyer, isn’t content with that battle; he spices the mix with Parker’s past as a child actor, his turbulent relationship with his mother, who grabbed his earnings years ago and donated them to the Assembly, and his unlikely and unethical romance with one of the law school students helping him on the case. Not to mention the question of whether he’ll ever be able to raise his voice above a squeak before the bench.
A sinister cult, political payoffs, hard-core sex tapes, stories about child abuse and one of the most stressed-out attorneys you’ll ever see. It’s hard to imagine what Rotstein has kept in reserve for the sequel.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61614-791-4
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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