Bear is broken A Leo Maxwell mystery

Lachlan Smith

Book - 2013

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Subjects
Genres
Legal stories
Mystery fiction
Published
New York : [Berkeley, Calif.] : Mysterious Press ; Distributed by Publishers Group West c2013.
Language
English
Main Author
Lachlan Smith (-)
Edition
1st ed
Physical Description
256 p. ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780802120793
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

When it comes to great settings for a crime novel, there's no place like home. For Stephan Talty, that's Buffalo, which he has made both the locale and a major character in his first thriller, BLACK IRISH (Ballantine, $26). As viewed by Detective Absalom (Abbie) Kearney, lately returned to care for a father whose mind is going, Buffalo is a decaying place, sunk in despair, haunted by its illustrious past. "The whole city was entombed by the artifacts of its glory days," she observes of the disintegrating waterfront, the bankrupt mills and "silent" smokestacks, the highways built for a population long gone. And nowhere is this sense of loss more keenly felt than in the section where Abbie grew up, "a patch of Ireland in the wilds of America" known as the County. "Some parts of the neighborhood never changed. The clannish logic. The hostility to outsiders. The secret, ancient warmth. The alcoholism." But while attitudes may have remained inflexible, the County has hardly escaped the passage of time. Drugs are in the schools, families are on welfare and churches have been abandoned, including St. Teresa's, which Abbie attended as a child - the same church where the mutilated body of Jimmy Ryan has turned up in the basement. As the adopted daughter of a revered local cop, Abbie is familiar with the strict social protocols observed in the County. But as someone who moved away and only recently made her way back, armed with a fancy college degree and a refined accent, she'll always be an outsider. None of these clannish people, who bear "an ancestral memory of being oppressed in a country they'd never been to," trust her on this murder case, which escalates into unspeakable savagery as the bodies pile up. The technical police work is not very convincing, and by placing Abbie and her family at the heart of the mystery, Talty limits his detective's objectivity. But there's something hypnotic about the voices heard up and down the streets and in holy places like the Gaelic Club, "the mother ship of the County," which was once the setting for dances and weddings and rowdy political gatherings. Now it's the scene of its own wake, a sight that strikes Abbie as unbearably sad. But, as the bartender observes, "anything that's dying's beautiful for a while." "No one likes a woman who knows how to kill with her bare hands." Brigid Quinn, the unconventional heroine of Becky Masterman's first novel, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING (Minotaur, $24.99), learned that lesson in her former career as an undercover F.B.I. agent. Nowadays, if anyone should ask, Brigid will say she investigated copyright infringements, since she's a fanatic about guarding her secrets from the new husband she adores. Although Brigid is determined to enjoy her early retirement in laid-back Tucson ("which everyone told me was a lovely place but that felt a lot like Siberia, only hot"), it's just her bad luck to attract a killer rapist who claims "older broads" as his "specialty." Still in fighting shape at 59, Brigid is one old broad who is tough to kill. So tough she accidentally kills this creep. Unfortunately, in her panic to cover up the deed, she alerts another maniac cruising the old Route 66, which for serial killers is "kind of like the Appalachian Trail, only paved." Brigid wears her age well, and she makes it work for her too. She knows people would like to think that as they get older "all women must get suddenly serene, their anger draining away with their estrogen." Some do, some don't. So, take her or leave her, "this is Brigid Quinn, a woman of a certain age, raging." Legal mysteries would be much more enjoyable if they didn't have self-aggrandizing lawyers in them. Lachlan Smith makes tidy work of neutralizing that problem in his first novel, BEAR IS BROKEN (Mysterious Press/Grove/ Atlantic, $24), by introducing us to Teddy Maxwell, a San Francisco attorney with the reputation of being "about as crooked as a lawyer can be." Sadly, this wonderful rogue (possessed of "a brilliance realized most fully in its decadent form") is shot in the head while having lunch with his kid brother, Leo. While Teddy lies in a coma, Leo, who's just passed his bar exam, does a respectable job of representing his brother's thuggish clients. He's also well on the way to nailing Teddy's attacker when Smith gets all tangled up in an unnecessarily complicated ending. Overplotting is a beginner's mistake, but Smith doesn't write like a novice. He'll surely get the hang of it next time. The free-for-all in DONNYBROOK (Ferrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $15) is a "three-day bareknuckles tournament" that a rich and sadistic patron of the arts holds on his 1,000-acre spread in rural Indiana. In Frank Bill's brutally funny first novel, fighters come from miles around to bash one another's brains out, until the last man standing is awarded a cool hundred grand. Among the brawlers and sports fans making the trek to this backwoods battlefield are Jarhead Earl, a lovable lug from the hills of southeastern Kentucky; Ali Squires ("Bare. Knuckle. God"); and Chainsaw Angus, a mad-dog meth dealer who, with his sister, Liz ("pure poison"), makes up a tag team of killers. Fun is fun, but Bill is also keeping track of the human fallout: the "children hanging from mothers anchored by out-of-work fathers" who live in "rotted houses and beat-down trailers" on country roads, waiting for the meth dealer to show up. A scene that could definitely make you want to fight. Stephan Talty makes the city of Buffalo both the locale and a major character in his first thriller.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 24, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Smith's first novel offers a superior blend of amateur-detective mystery and belated-coming-of-age novel cunningly masked as a legal thriller. Rookie lawyer Leo Maxell is shadowing his brother Teddy, a superstar San Francisco defense attorney, quickly becoming immersed in Teddy's courtroom magic and the constant rumors that Teddy's success is built on witness-tampering. Then, seemingly out of the blue, Teddy is gunned down in a crowded restaurant, and Leo must acknowledge that his brother has cultivated real enemies. SFPD detectives make it clear that they think Teddy had it coming, and Leo is left wondering whether the cops are running an investigation or exacting vengeance. Determined to find the shooter's motive, Leo becomes the Energizer Bunny of detection, relentlessly churning until he unburies a lead. Before long, he's found secret clients, suspicious behavior in Teddy's closest associates, and a duo of taser-wielding women lurking in Teddy's digs. Tenacity trumps technique fortunately, because Leo is no sleuth. His search is more a desperate urge to connect with his untouchable big brother than a quest for justice, about which he is fairly ambivalent. Smith combines a smart but clueless protagonist forced to drop his naivete; a gathering of well-drawn, equally motivated suspects; and, yes, some plot-furthering sex and violence. San Francisco's gritty streets and neighboring redwood forests add to the appeal, and the addictive characters and the quirky, sideways look at the system close the deal on a terrific debut. A perfect match with David Carnoy's novels and Michael Connelly's Mickey Haller series.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Set in 1999, Smith's powerful legal thriller debut, the first in a series, grabs the reader by the throat and doesn't let go. At a San Francisco restaurant, where Leo Maxwell, a freshly minted attorney, has met older brother Teddy, a local legend as a defense lawyer, for lunch, Leo feels flattered when Teddy tells him, "I ought to let you close this one," a reference to the closing statement Teddy is soon to deliver in the case of Ellis Bradley, who's accused of raping his wife. Then a stranger comes up behind Leo and shoots Teddy in the head. This violent act, which puts Teddy in a coma with little chance for recovery, places Leo in the position of trying to serve Bradley's interests by avoiding a mistrial and carrying on in his brother's stead-and finding out the who and why of the murder attempt. Assured prose and taut plotting add up to a winner. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Leo Maxwell just received his bar licence and has been shadowing his older brother Teddy, a well known San Francisco criminal lawyer. The novel opens with Teddy being shot point blank in the head as the two brothers eat lunch in Teddy's usual restaurant. In the aftermath of the shooting, Leo faces a new reality and tries to sort the truth from the lies regarding Teddy's- business practices, ethics, and private life; in addition, Leo realizes that if his brother survives, Teddy will never be the same man he once was. Because of Teddy's success as a criminal defense lawyer, the police don't seem interested in investigating his shooting, and Leo is determined to find the shooter himself. VERDICT This engaging debut by a practicing Alabama attorney features well-drawn if somewhat unlikable characters and enough plot twists to please any mystery fan. A good read-alike recommendation for readers who enjoy David Hosp and S.J. Bolton. [See Prepub Alert, 8/20/12.]-Lisa Hanson O'Hara, Univ. of Manitoba Libs. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A newly minted attorney investigating his brother's shooting ends up learning more about the victim than he'd ever wanted to know. Hours after being sworn as a member of the California bar, Leo Maxwell is having lunch with his lawyer-brother Teddy when a stranger walks into the restaurant, fires a bullet into Teddy's face and leaves. As Teddy hovers in a coma, Detective Anderson, who has no love for the man he tells Leo was as dirty as a lawyer can be in San Francisco, plans to arrest Ricky Santorez, Teddy's most famous client, for the crime. Ricky has a grade-A alibi, since he's spent the past several years in San Quentin after killing two cops who burst into his place by mistake and caught him with a highly illegal weapon, but Anderson says that a snitch fingered him for hiring the job. Since the snitch is Lawrence Maxwell, Teddy and Leo's father, who's been locked up for a dozen years for killing his wife, Caroline, Leo takes an even more personal interest in the case. His search for other suspects leads him to the family of Keith Locke, a client Teddy was defending against the charge of murdering thrill-seeking sociologist professor Sam Marovich, whose corpse he was found trying to push through a window of the sex club where Keith worked. The suspects are familiar types--Keith's imperious father, Gerald, his fiercely protective mother, Greta, his sexually alluring sister Christine--but newcomer Smith juggles them with supernal dexterity, and the final showdown is hair-raising. Sensitive, ingenious and suspenseful. A series is promised and very welcome indeed.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.