A finely crafted legal thriller with fully realized characters.
A criminal prosecutor returns as a judge with a target on her back in this fifth installment of a series.
After many years as a prosecutor, Dana Hargrove finds herself on the other side of the bench. It turns out being a trial judge on the New York Supreme Court is just as exciting as being an attorney, particularly when presiding over the cases of two high-visibility defendants. Suzy Spinnaker is a former tech millionaire charged with the murder of her business partner, Connor Davidson. When the jury convicts her of manslaughter, Dana must decide her sentence. Garth Underwood is an orthopedist who sold pills on the side—until two people ended up dead. To make matters stranger, the judge’s younger sister, Cheryl Hargrove, is currently playing a district attorney based on Dana on a hit television show called Plain Justice. The home front doesn’t offer much respite. Dana and her husband, Evan Goodhue—who recently became a law professor—have grown distant from each other in the absence of their children, now away at college. Then a threatening letter arrives at Dana’s office. Soon Evan gets one at school. Someone is trying to influence Dana’s rulings, but who? And how far will they go? Kemanis (Your Pick, 2018, etc.) writes in a precise prose that elucidates the stakes of the cases while delving into the interior lives of her characters: “Allow the evidence or exclude it—either way, Judge Hargrove’s reputation is on the line, just like it is in the Spinnaker case. Suzy again. Not now! She pushes that case to the back of her mind. Sentencing is still a month away.” The author takes time to build her characters—Cheryl and Evan are drawn with the same complexity as Dana—and this gives greater emotional depth to the story than one often finds in legal thrillers. Each book in the series—the earliest of which is set in 1988—jumps six or seven years ahead in Dana’s life: a bold strategy to show how much a lawyer can change over the course of her career. This tale stands well enough alone, but those who read it will want to go back and discover the previous volumes.
A finely crafted legal thriller with fully realized characters.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9997850-5-8
Page Count: 331
Publisher: Opus Nine Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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