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
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.
Having been falsely convicted of murder himself years ago, prosecutor Rusty Sabich defies common wisdom in defending his romantic partner’s adopted son against the same accusation.
Now 76, Rusty has retired to the (fictitious) Skageon Region in the upper Midwest, far removed from Kindle County, Turow’s Chicago stand-in, where he was a star attorney and judge. Aaron Housley, a Black man raised in a bleached rural environment, has had his troubles, including serving four months for holding drugs purchased by Mae Potter, his erratic, on-and-off girlfriend. Now, after suddenly disappearing to parts unknown with her, he returns alone. When days go by without Mae’s reappearance, it is widely assumed that Aaron harmed her. Why else would he be in possession of her phone? Following the discovery of Mae’s strangled body and incriminating evidence that points to Aaron, Rusty steps in. Opposed in court by the uncontrollable, gloriously named prosecutor Hiram Jackdorp, he fears he’s in a lose-lose situation. If he fails to get Aaron off, which is highly possible, the boy’s mother, Bea, will never forgive him. If Rusty wins the case, the quietly detached Bea—who, like half the town, has secrets—will have trouble living with the unsparing methods Rusty uses to free Aaron. In attempting to match, or at least approach, the brilliance of his groundbreaking masterpiece Presumed Innocent (1987), Turow has his own odds to overcome. No minor achievement like a previous follow-up, Innocent (2010), the new novel is a powerful display of straightforward narrative, stuffed with compelling descriptions of people, places, and the legal process. No one stages courtroom scenes better than this celebrated Chicago attorney. But the book, whose overly long scenes add up to more than 500 pages, mostly lacks the gripping intensity and high moral drama to keep those pages turning. It’s an absorbing and entertaining read, but Turow’s fans have come to expect more than that.
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538706367
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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