An adept and timely courtroom drama.
A judge confronts the rigors of an appellate court in this latest legal thriller in Kemanis’ series.
Dana Hargrove has come up in the world. The post-pandemic world finds Dana as an associate justice of New York City’s appellate division, meaning that she must now debate and compromise with other judges before handing down verdicts. Her current troublesome case is that of Josie Merced, a 17-year-old with Hodgkin’s lymphoma who’s been removed from her aunt’s care by Child Protective Services, who claim that the aunt has failed to provide Josie with lifesaving treatment. The case is tricky, however; it was Josie’s decision to refuse chemotherapy after seeing what it did to her late mother. Further complicating the matter is the fact that Dana’s son, Travis, is now an appellate attorney representing CPS, and his potentially career-making argument is at odds with Dana’s core beliefs. Meanwhile, Dana remains obsessed with a 2-year-old murder case in which both the victim and perpetrator are cops. Accusations of nepotism and coverup haunt the present investigation and trial, and her daughter, Natalie, a psychology grad student, is connected to one of the people involved, further muddying the waters. Can Dana maintain the objectivity that justice requires? Kemanis writes with typical elegance and control, spinning the intricacies of the law into moments of humor and drama, by turns. Here, for instance, she describes Dana’s reaction to being outvoted on the court: “She makes the effort to convince, even with those colleagues who stand firm in wet cement, daring her to watch it dry as she talks herself blue in the face.” The characters, new and old, bring with them a depth of history that lends the novel a gripping feeling of verisimilitude. With this book, Kemanis has brought Dana into roiling legal battles of the present day, dealing with issues of bodily autonomy and police violence that feel particularly urgent and timely. Dana hasn’t softened with age, and fans of the series are sure to enjoy this latest installment.
An adept and timely courtroom drama.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-7378479-0-8
Page Count: 317
Publisher: Opus Nine Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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