A sufficient legal mystery but the protagonist’s complicated love life steals the show.
An environmental lawyer works a case involving the deaths of two teenagers from mysterious chemicals in this debut thriller.
In Mike Jacobs’ few years at the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, his boss has assigned him lousy cases. Now he’s finally second-chairing something substantial: the sudden deaths of teens Peter Mason and Cindy Battaglia. The young couple swam in a river that’s evidently a dumping site for chemicals; phenol exposure is ultimately what proved fatal. As Mike searches for the culprit responsible for illegal dumping, his personal life gets significantly more complex. He begins casually dating two women: Sherry Stein, a deputy attorney general, and Patty Dixon, a nurse at the home where his sickly mother resides. Both relationships become more serious, and Mike struggles with his choice of committing to one and severing the other. Meanwhile, Mike receives a phone call warning him off his investigation and is completely unaware that a certain car is regularly following him. And with a gubernatorial election on the horizon, powerful individuals have their eyes on the unfolding case. The incumbent governor wants to use the tragedy against his opponent, District Attorney Gerald Sheehan, who’s cooking up his own sinister scheme. Burcat packs his story with enthralling subplots and characters. Mike, for example, has phone conversations with his rabbi brother concerning their mother, who has early-onset Alzheimer’s, and gets relationship advice from first chair Roger Alden. Likewise, the women are multidimensional: Sherry is investigating Sheehan’s possibly crooked campaign funds, and Patty is a single mom with an ex-boyfriend who won’t pay child support. They’re likable as well, making indecisive Mike a less than stellar protagonist who can’t even decide if his actions are honest or dishonest. Despite a solid setup and intelligent prose, the environmental-themed mystery gradually reaches a conclusion with little input from Mike. Readers may be more invested in the inevitable confrontation between Sherry and Patty, and in that regard, the story doesn’t disappoint.
A sufficient legal mystery but the protagonist’s complicated love life steals the show.Pub Date: May 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-946664-62-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Headline Books, Inc.
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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