Pages

Monday, January 3, 2011

It would be a crime to miss these new Bestsellers!

The Reversal by Michael Connelly


Publishers Weekly –


In Connelly's engaging second thriller to team defense attorney Mickey Haller and LAPD detective Harry Bosch (after The Brass Verdict), new DNA evidence leads to the release of Jason Jessup, who was convicted of murdering 12-year-old Melissa Landy 24 years earlier. Prosecutors in the L.A. DA's office, faced with retrying Jessup, approach Haller for help. Haller agrees to assist if he can use Bosch as his investigator, and his lawyer ex-wife, Maggie McPherson, as "second chair" at the new trial. Bosch begins reconstructing the 1986 case and tracking down witnesses, including Landy's older sister, who identified Jessup as the man who abducted her sister. Not used to being under the watchful eye of the DA's office, Haller must stay one step ahead of Jessup's oily defense attorney and Jessup himself, whose years in prison have only fueled his hatred of the legal system. Sparks inevitably fly when the equally stubborn Haller and Bosch must work toward a common goal.







Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane


Publishers Weekly –


An old case takes on new dimensions in Lehane's sixth crime novel to feature Boston PIs Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, last seen in 1999's Prayers for Rain. Twelve years earlier, in 1998's Gone, Baby, Gone, Patrick and Angie investigated the kidnapping of four-year-old Amanda McCready. The case drove a temporary wedge between the pair after Patrick returned Amanda to her mother's neglectful care. Now Patrick and Angie are married, the parents of four-year-old Gabriella, and barely making ends meet with Patrick's PI gigs while Angie finishes graduate school. But when Amanda's aunt comes to Patrick and tells him that Amanda, now a 16-year-old honor student, is once again missing, he vows to find the girl, even if it means confronting the consequences of choices he made that have haunted him for years. While Lehane addresses much of the moral ambiguity from Gone, this entry lacks some of the gritty rawness of the early Kenzie and Gennaro books.







Indulgence in Death by J. D. Robb


Publishers Weekly –


Lt. Eve Dallas of the New York Police and Security Department returns home from a long overdue Irish vacation to a string of bizarre murders in Robb's thrilling 32nd future cop novel (after Fantasy in Death). The crossbow killing of chauffeur Jamal Houston in his limo in a La Guardia parking lot is followed by the death of high-rent prostitute Ava Crampton, found at Coney Island's House of Horrors stabbed with a bayonet. Other victims include Luc Delaflote, a celebrity chef who's harpooned, and Adrianne Jonas, "a facilitator for the rich" strangled with a handmade bullwhip. Eve, assisted by her trustworthy sidekicks, Det. Delia Peabody and husband Roarke, uncovers a wicked game that grows increasingly macabre. Robb (the pseudonym of Nora Roberts) keeps the reader squirming as Eve and company try to avoid dying in weird ways themselves.





The Confession by John Grisham


Publishers Weekly –


Grisham's recent slump continues with another subpar effort whose plot and characters, none of whom are painted in shades of gray, aren't able to support an earnest protest against the death penalty. In 2007, almost on the eve of the execution of Donté Drumm, an African-American college football star, for the 1998 murder of a white cheerleader whose body was never found, Travis Boyette, a creepy multiple sex offender, confesses that he's guilty of the crime to Kansas minister Keith Schroeder. With Drumm's legal options dwindling fast and with the threat of civil unrest in his Texas hometown if the execution proceeds, Schroeder battles to convince Boyette to go public with the truth--and to persuade the condemned man's attorney that Boyette's story needs to be taken seriously. While the action progresses with a certain grim realism, Schroeder's superficial responses to the issues raised undercut the impact. As with The Appeal, the author's passionate views on serious flaws in the justice system don't translate well into fiction.



No comments:

Archive