The bad news is that the returning of Alejandro Stern, the canny defense attorney in Presumed Innocent, isn't nearly as devilishly twisty as he was in Turow's earlier megaseller. The good news is that Sandy Stem's own problems make for a compelling novel of a different sort. These problems surface when Sandy arrives home—preoccupied with his defense of his sister Silvia's husband (and Sandy's old school friend) Dixon Hartnack, whose coyly named commodities house, Maison Dixon, is under federal investigation for taking advantage of clients' futures orders to place illegal preemptive orders—to find that his wife Clara has killed herself. Why did his placid wife of 30 years commit suicide? What sort of prescription was filled for her only a short time before her death? And what could Clara's death have to do with the financial shenanigans of her Mephistophelean brother Dixon? Stumbling through grief and guilt, dredging up painful memories of his early meetings with Clara—he'd first been interested in her as a way to secure his position with her powerful father—and plunging into sexual escapades that eventually lead him to 40-ish federal attorney Sonia Klonsky, married, pregnant, and Dixon's principal nemesis, Sandy is stunned (and even farsighted readers will be too) to find how insidiously Dixon's troubles have twined themselves around Silvia and Sandy's children—Marta, Kate, and Peter. Although the whodunit question so prominent in Presumed Innocent is downplayed, Turow is a master at dramatizing legal complexities (Dixon deposits an incriminating safe with Sandy; Sandy warns him that he'll have to turn it over to the feds; Dixon steals it from the office; Sandy and a client break into Dixon's home to steal it back), and the last hundred pages of revelations about Sandy's decent, humane family are riveting. Despite a slow start and an overdose of middle-age angst, this complex, meditative novel is as richly entertaining as its predecessor. A surefire best-seller for summer—and on into the fall.
Pub Date: June 5, 1990
ISBN: 0446584177
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1990
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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