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
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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