Review by Booklist Review
Defense attorney Robin Lockwood has a tricky problem to resolve. A retired DA has proof that a man he convicted for murder three decades ago is innocent, but he can't reveal the proof because he's bound by attorney-client privilege. To free the wrongly convicted man, Robin must find a workaround. But is such a thing possible? An intriguing situation, and it's only the beginning of this audacious combination of a legal thriller and a modern-day Gothic. The titular Black Oaks is the name of a centuries-old, moody, possibly cursed English manor house that was transplanted and rebuilt in Oregon. It's the retired DA's home, and it's the key setting (a character, really) for the bulk of the action. This is the sixth Lockwood novel, and it's certainly the gutsiest. Margolin risks straining the reader's credibility with talk of curses, but the risks pay off exceedingly well. Readers who enjoy a traditional legal thriller with some distinctly nontraditional story elements should really enjoy this one.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Margolin's enjoyable sixth novel featuring Portland, Ore., defense attorney Robin Lockwood (after The Darkest Place) effectively merges a legal thriller with an impossible crime. Frank Melville retired from practicing law after securing an acquittal for Archie Stallings, a client accused of date rape, in 1997. Stallings had previously been Melville's prime witness in his successful prosecution in 1990 of Jose Alvarez for bludgeoning to death a fellow college student, Margo Prescott. After the acquittal, Stallings shocked Melville by confessing to both the rape and to killing Prescott, relying on attorney-client privilege to remain at liberty for the homicide. Now, after Stallings's death from a heart attack, Melville calls Robin to Black Oaks, his isolated mansion in the Oregon hills, in the hope she can find a way around the privilege to exonerate Alvarez, who's been on death row for decades. Robin's visit to Black Oaks is complicated by a stabbing murder inside a locked elevator in the mansion. A curse attached to the mansion adds to the intrigue. Both the solution to Melville's dilemma and the one to the locked-room murder are convincing. John Dickson Carr fans will be pleased. Agent: Jennifer Weltz, Jean V. Naggar Literary. (Nov.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
When retired district attorney Francis Hardy invites defense attorney Robin Lockwood to his Oregon mountains manor, which legend says is cursed, he asks her to help reverse a wrongful conviction from his past. Lockwood's efforts are successful, but Hardy is later stabbed to death with a knife linked to the curse, and Lockwood has a whole new assignment. With a 75,000-copy first printing.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A former prosecutor haunted by his role in the unjust conviction of a murder suspect years ago summons noted attorney Robin Lockwood to his isolated Oregon manse to enlist her aid. What could possibly go wrong? Archie Stallings was the star witness against fellow student Jose Alvarez in 1990, when Alvarez was sentenced to death in the matter of his girlfriend Margo Prescott's fatal bludgeoning. Seven years later, a gloating confession that Stallings makes to the lawyer defending him against a rape charge, Frank Melville--whose ringing courtroom speech when he was a prosecutor sent Alvarez to death row--torments Melville, since attorney-client privilege demands his silence. Upon Stallings' own death, Melville resolves to do whatever it takes to win Alvarez's release. Working under his direction with investigator Ken Breland, Robin gets Alvarez's conviction overturned, and he's set free. But he's not grateful or happy about his invitation to Black Oaks, Melville's mountaintop retreat, which has its own dark history of murder. When Corey Rockwell, the fading Hollywood star Melville's invited to join them, ostensibly to discuss making a film based on the Alvarez case, begins to smell a rat, the stage is set for Melville's stabbing in his private elevator. Margolin steeps this impossible murder in a nostalgic brew of family curses, ancient grudges, escaped convicts, improbable masquerades, supplementary homicides, and other contrivances. Fans will rejoice to detect echoes of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, Ellery Queen's The Siamese Twin Mystery, and countless puzzles by John Dickson Carr, though they may find the net effect more like a scrapbook of beloved memories than a coherent narrative of contemporary murder. An unapologetic valentine to golden age whodunits that sports its clichés as proudly as badges. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
