A legal yarn with an ungainly structure that’s rescued by punchy prose.
Three attorneys get involved in a dangerous plot involving sex work in this series mystery.
Impellizzeri’s tale centers on Tricia Connors, a starry-eyed young associate at the Manhattan firm of Barr Knoll, run by its charismatic, egotistical founder of the same name. Instead of the great opportunities Barr promised, she finds herself relegated to menial tasks along with her roommates, Cassandra and Ruth. Tricia is taken in hand and given a style makeover by a woman known only as the Times Square Madam, who inhabits the firm’s top-floor office. She has Tricia rope Cassandra and Ruth into an immigration scam in which the trio pretend to be engaged to three of the firm’s foreign clients to help them score visas. Subsequent assignments involve explicitly sexual “client development” tasks; Cassandra and Ruth resist, but Tricia goes along while angling to become the new madam. In a plotline set in a post-Covid present, Barr Knoll associate Carly Jenner stumbles across files pertaining to deaths in a suspicious car crash 10 years earlier. Carly’s colleague Rain Street believes the victims were murdered and prods Carly to investigate; meanwhile, Carly is fighting on behalf of a group of women in a workplace sex-discrimination lawsuit. This second installment of Impellizzeri’s Riversedge Law Club series paints a mordant picture of low-level lawyering with a feminist edge. Her characters are overworked, underpaid, and perpetually exploited and demeaned by creepy patriarchs. The braided subplots feel unfocused and overcomplicated at times, and the story sometimes spins its wheels as Tricia and Carly ruminate on their unhappy lives. Fortunately, Impellizzeri’s prose is shrewd and evocative (“Rain has a way of drawing people out. Like she already knows your secrets. Like you’re just confirming and not confessing”), and the courtroom jousting is lively and well paced: “Barr, you haven’t changed a bit from the days I was working for you and watching you pimp out women as whores to international real estate tycoons,” testifies one implacable witness on the stand.
A legal yarn with an ungainly structure that’s rescued by punchy prose.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781954332485
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.
The feds must protect an accused criminal and an orphaned girl.
Maybe you’ve met him before as protagonist of The 6:20 Man (2022): Ex-Army Ranger Travis Devine, who’d had the dubious fortune to tangle with “the girl on the train,” is now assigned by his homeland security boss to protect Danny Glass, who's awaiting trial on multiple RICO charges in Washington state. Devine has what it takes: He “was a closer, snooper, fixer, investigator,” and, when necessary, a killer. These skills are on full display as the deaths of three key witnesses grind justice to a temporary halt. Glass has a 12-year-old niece, Betsy Odom, and each is the other’s only living relative—her parents recently died of an apparent drug overdose. The FBI has temporary guardianship of Betsy, who's a handful. She tells Travis that though she’s not yet 13, she's 28 in “life-shit years.” The financially well-heeled Glass wants to be her legal guardian with an eye to eventual adoption, but what are his real motives? And what happens to her if he's convicted? Meanwhile, Betsy insists that her parents never touched drugs, and she begs Travis to find out how they really died. This becomes part of a mission that oozes danger. The small town of Ricketts has a woman mayor who’s full of charm on the surface, but deeply corrupt and deadly when crossed. She may be linked to a subversive group called "12/24/65," as in 1865, when the Ku Klux Klan beast was born. Blood flows, bombs explode, and people perish, both good guys and not-so-good guys. Readers might ponder why in fiction as well as in life, it sometimes seems necessary for many to die so one may live. And what about the girl on the train? She's not necessary to the plot, but she's a fun addition as she pops in and out of the pages, occasionally leaving notes for Travis. Maybe she still wants him dead.
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757901
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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
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