I’m not buying that “Anonymous” crap. Sparks claimed that this was a journal of one of her patients, a teen addicted to drugs that ruined her life. Sparks has this amazing luck with finding kids with hot button issues that also loved journaling AND letting their therapist have all their old diaries. These teens also were really focused in their writing, only covering said moral panic issues and not the usual crap that all of us other teens wrote about. The irony is that Sparks wrote […]
Great tell-it-like-it-is legal tale with just the right mix of humor and courtroom hijinx
A late work that hadn’t caught my eye before, The Litigators brought me hurtling back into the Grisham fold. This book offers a fast-moving and painfully realistic story about mass tort litigation, along with a satisfying array of characters, and just enough laugh-out-loud moments and real-life horror stories to keep those pages turning til the end. The story opens just as young corporate lawyer David Zinc is having a full-scale panic attack on the way to his 93rd floor cubicle where he does mind-numbing financial […]
An unsuccessful glimpse inside the mind of a killer
Nesbo steps away from his standard Norwegian detective fare with this slim new novel that starts and ends with the blood of a murdered man soaking into the snow. Blood on Snow is written from the viewpoint of a mob “fixer,” a contract killer named Olav who is kept on the payroll of Oslo’s biggest crime boss to take care of problems that his boss doesn’t want to think about. These problems range from snitches to competitors to an unfaithful wife. And until Olav catches […]
A book about the American character and the ties that bind
Thompson opened up an unfamiliar world for me inside my very own country, the world of the mid-West where change comes more slowly … but inexorably. Jean Thompson’s book reminded me a bit of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections in that it offers a long view of a mid-western family’s trials and tribulations. And yet Thompson treats her characters with the poignancy and compassion that real, if flawed, people deserve, while Franzen’s characters were too often caricaturized and mocked for my taste. The Ericksons are a […]
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