This was an excellent book that is part journalistic inquiry, part court-room drama, and part social discourse. Janet Malcolm is an experienced journalist who receives a mysterious letter from a lawyer suggesting that a libel court case may ruin the entire professional sphere of journalism. Malcolm takes the bait and begins investigating the already exhaustively investigated murder trial of a Dr. Jeff MacDonald and his follow up libel case with his court-biographer, Joseph McGrinnis. Throughout her book, Malcolm chronicles how Dr. MacDonald came to be […]
Courtroom thriller without the usual Lescroart oomph!
Neither as meaty nor as finely drawn as Lescroart’s earlier and more emotionally complex thrillers, The Fall nonetheless fits the bill for a combination murder mystery/courtroom drama that dovetails with this country’s soaring racial tensions between police and African-Americans. The Fall deals with the first major legal case of Rebecca (“The Beck”) Hardy, daughter of Lescroart’s serial hero Dismas Hardy. The Beck is now an associate in Hardy’s law firm and gets her first chance at a murder trial in defense of one Greg Treadway, […]
A Satanic Conspiracy of Skinny
This novel would be downright silly, if it weren’t so darned sweet. The premise of The Program is that Satan has launched a miraculous weight-loss program designed to ensnare the souls of millions of sad women who have been brainwashed into believing that curves mean fat, and fat means unsexy and unloveable. And so Lovett takes on the obsession with weight that dominates the world’s media, entertainment industry, fashion industry, and bedrooms around the globe, and presents us with a different reality, one in which […]
A Double-Helix of a Crime Thriller
Lucky me! I thought I had read them all, and then I run across yet another Connelly, this one from 2001, that I had somehow missed. A Darkness More Than Night teams up two of Connelly’s “heroes,” my favorite LAPD detective Hieronymous Bosch and retired FBI profiler and heart transplant recipient Terry McCaleb, in a doubly-complex crime/courtroom drama that satisfies on all fronts. A man is found murdered in his own apartment, with no forensic evidence to pursue except for the weird way in which […]