A remarkable cast sparks this incisive, riveting tale of intolerance.
An immigration lawyer and her latest client both face injustice and a host of menaces in Arama’s debut thriller.
Seattle-based attorney Laura Holban reluctantly takes on a new case despite her hefty workload. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have just arrested undocumented Guatemalan immigrant Emilio Ramirez, who has lived in Washington state with a happy family and a steady job for more than two decades. But he’s now up against Seattle’s chief ICE prosecutor, Mason Waltman, who seems determined to eject him from the country. Laura’s burden is to prove that her client shouldn’t be deported, a task that is complicated by a false assault claim leveled at Emilio. Someone appears to really want Emilio back in Guatemala; his family’s home is broken into, and Laura is physically intimidated in an effort to get her to drop the case. Suddenly, questions arise about the validity of Laura’s own green card, which she received when she immigrated to the United States from Romania 18 years earlier. Laura worries that Emilio will be killed if he returns to his native country, a sad fate that’s befallen other clients of hers—but the greatest danger for her, Emilio, and his family may be much closer to home. Arama’s taut narrative brims with tension and indelible characters. The author is sensitive to discrimination (“When a native speaker makes a mistake, it’s because they’re tired or distracted. When an immigrant makes the same mistake, it’s because they’re dumb”) and microaggressions: Several people make note of Laura’s accent, as if she’s a tourist in the country she’s made her home. The story derives suspense from unpredictable threats courtesy of ICE, crooked lawyers, and the mysterious figure targeting Emilio. Most of Laura’s fight takes place outside the courtroom, where only a few scenes are set. Violence crops up in the final act, though it’s nominal, and the ending packs a mean dramatic punch.
A remarkable cast sparks this incisive, riveting tale of intolerance.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781947845381
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ooligan Press
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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