Bad Lawyer by David Cray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"'[...] juries are mostly too stupid to follow what witnesses actually say. They rely on manner, like they were at home watching television.'"

I suspect I like David Cray's Bad Lawyer (2001) so much because it pushes several of my 'hot buttons.' Serious flaws of the jury system are my main concern as to the American justice system: based on my personal observations I would rather have a trained judge decide my case than a panel of my "peers" who treat jury service as entertainment in their empty lives or, even worse, who yearn to be in a position of power to mete punishment to others.

Yet in my view, Bad Lawyer also delivers in suspense, tension, plot structure, and - many readers will probably like it - major, major plot twists. The story is narrated by Stanley Kaplan, a once extremely successful lawyer, with a 450SL and a co-op on Central Park West, whose career was destroyed by booze and cocaine. After a full-year rehab, Mr. Kaplan is starting again; his team includes an investigator and a legal secretary: the three of them are united by each having had a very painful past. They are so tight that, in the narrator's words, they form

"a curiously asexual menage à trois that maintained itself through a tyranny of memory, a pure terror of the past."

A woman hires Mr. Kaplan to defend her daughter who has been arrested and accused of murdering her husband. There has been a documented history of serious physical abuse by the victim, so Mr. Kaplan's is planning the prove self-defense. There are serious complication as the case seems to be connected with drug dealing and the accused had had three drug convictions in her past.

The case has been picked up by the media and it is being tried in the court of public opinion even before the criminal trial begins. This is another of my hot-button issues: not only do the media have the potential to pervert the course of justice but they frequently do it, ironically, in the name of justice. What right do the journalists or TV people have to shape the public's perceptions of the case by using trigger words, phrases or images?

Not only is the case tried in the media but there are two opposing camps trying to convince the public to their angle of looking at the case: on one side we have organizations that advocate women's rights - they focus on the history of physical abuse. On the other side we have the black community - the victim was an African-American - whose members claim that the white-owned media are trying to exonerate the killer before the trial begins. This is yet another of my hot-button issues: the near-automatic jumping of various social advocacy groups on the bandwagon of any event that achieves a degree of notoriety.

Anyway, the media battle is raging, which has absolutely nothing to do with truth or justice but all with entertainment. The plot takes several dramatic turns, which - for once - are mostly plausible. I will not provide any spoilers - as opposed to the usual explicit hints given by the publisher on the sleeves of the dust jacket. I highly recommend this legal thriller which, to me, is exceptional among the usual bestselling and totally cliché novels of this genre.

Four-and-a-quarter stars.


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Brezhnev, Soviet Politician by Paul J. Murphy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[Brezhnev] survived on the obstacle strewn path to power because he possessed the right mixture of tenacious energy, drive, cunning, discipline, ruthlessness, concealment, a polemic-sharpened intellect and a healthy respect for the Soviet political terrain."

My fourth read in a series about Soviet Communist party leaders is a biography of Leonid Brezhnev, a man who held the reins of power of the entire Soviet empire for 18 long years, between 1964 and 1982. Paul J. Murphy's Brezhnev. Soviet Politician (1981) was published while Brezhnev was still the Supreme Leader but it was already clear that his days were numbered because of massive health problems. The biography is not a particularly enthralling read, which may not be the author's fault: Brezhnev's is not a fascinating personality. He is not a ruthless murderer and torturer of untold millions like Stalin, not an enigma like Andropov, and not an accidental revolutionary like Gorbachev. Brezhnev is precisely like his characterization in the epigraph - a skillful politician, a clever party bureaucrat:

"[...] a safe Party man with practical experience who, though a trifle lackluster, had the requisite drive and leadership ability. [...] Brezhnev had proven himself to be a 'pragmatist' and a 'political engineer.'"

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, born in 1906, grew up in the times of the October Revolution, and - along with his family - survived the horrors of the bloody civil war in Ukraine that caused mass hunger and even occasional cases of cannibalism. The author claims that the estimated total of 14 million people died from starvation. After Brezhnev had joined Komsomol (The Young Communists League) he actively participated in "land consolidation" decreed by Stalin. Brezhnev was an eager enforcer of collectivization, forcefully taking land from the peasants to create "collective farms". Young party activists had to participate in the brutal process; otherwise they would be denounced as lax in enforcing the policies by more eager young party activists, and then executed.

In 1935 Brezhnev graduates from an engineering university and begins his rise in the party bureaucracy as a protégé of Khrushchev (see my review of his biography Khrushchev ), who succeeded Stalin in 1953). When the Germans outfox and surprise Stalin (the "Genius of Strategy") with the attack in 1941, Brezhnev distinguishes himself in military service during the Great Patriotic War and, after the war, along with Khrushchev organizes the efforts to rebuild the country.

It is during the momentous Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 (Krushchev gave his famous "secret speech" denouncing Stalin's murderous regime) that Brezhnev firmly becomes a member of the top Soviet leadership and, in 1960, the President of the Soviet Union. The Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the Cuban Crisis of 1962, when the world is as close to the all-out nuclear war as it has never been before, shows the divisions in the Soviet leadership, and the power struggle begins in earnest.

Khrushchev is ousted in 1964 and the 18-year-long Brezhnev era begins. The author characterizes these years focusing on three aspects. Soviet Union becomes the only other superpower, with political and military might equal to that, if not greater than, of the United States. Second, this is the era of very active Soviet foreign policy and those are the years of détente the general easing of international tensions. Soviet Union, unable to compete economically with the Western world is trying to outdo the West in so-called "peace efforts." Finally, in 1979 the Soviet forces invade Afghanistan; the war becomes a sort of Soviet Vietnam and contributes to accelerating the decline of the Soviet empire. The arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in the top leadership in 1978 is a harbinger of changes to come (I am planning to review another biography of Gorbachev soon).

There are numerous typos in the book; I don't think I have ever read a book with so many typos - not the author's fault, I guess. Anyway, even with the sloppiness, it is an worthwhile if not that captivating read.

Three stars.

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B is for Burglar by Sue Grafton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Most of my investigations proceed just like this. Endless notes, endless sources checked and rechecked, pursuing leads that sometimes go no place. Usually, I start in the same place, plodding along methodically, never knowing at first what might be significant. It's all detail; facts accumulated painstakingly. "

B is for Burglar (1985) continues my "Re-Read Early Grafton" project. Following a pattern that seems to be common for series of novels, after the great first effort of A is for Alibi, which I like a lot and quite enthusiastically review here , comes the sophomore-jinxed disappointment of the second installment in a series. However, I need to disclaim a clear bias of mine: B has some touches of "mystery coziness," and I intensely dislike the "cozy subgenre." Ms. Grafton's plot includes an amateur octogenarian sleuth trying to help Kinsey solve the case, which significantly cools my enthusiasm. Yet even without the Granny Sleuth thread B feels lightweight compared to its groundbreaking predecessor.

Briefly about the plot: Kinsey is hired by one Ms. Danziger to find her sister, Elaine, who is needed for a signature on some inheritance document and is nowhere to be found. The missing woman is known to alternate her residence between Santa Teresa and Florida; thus, after talking to some of Elaine's acquaintances in Santa Teresa, Kinsey flies to Florida where she talks to a woman who lived with Elaine in her condo. She also meets the nice and inquisitive 80-something Mrs. Ochsner, the Granny Sleuth later in the plot.

Back in Santa Teresa Kinsey continues her inquiries. A connection emerges with a local murder that happened several months earlier. To my taste there are too many serendipitous occurrences that help Kinsey with the case. However, a neat thread that involves the missing luggage nicely ratchets up the suspense. The denouement, though not particularly surprising, is logical and does not feel too contrived.

I like few passages in the book. The lush yet understated quiet elegance of Santa Teresa (Santa Barbara, really, from the early 1980s) is well portrayed:

"Everything is stucco, red tile roofs, bougainvillea, distressed beams, adobe brick walls, arched windows, palm trees, balconies, ferns, fountains, paseos, and flowers in bloom. Historical restorations abound. It's all oddly unsettling - so lush and refined that it ruins you for anyplace else."

The reader will find some gently sarcastic humor:

"There's no place in a P.I.'s life for impatience, faintheartedness, or sloppiness. I understand the same qualifications apply for housewives."

Ms. Grafton's words about people losing their privacy in the world of data are prophetic:

"Most of our personal data is a matter of public record. All you have to know is how to look it up."

Thirty-four years later millions and millions of people voluntarily relinquish their privacy, offering their innermost secrets to business scams known as Facebook or Instagram.

I hate guns and am apprehensive about people fascinated with weapons and shooting. So I am queasy about the passage where Kinsey confesses:

"I have fallen in love with the smell of gunpowder [...]"

Napalm in the morning smells good too, doesn't it? Well, to each their own. B is quite a readable mystery yet way below the level of A. Let's see about C.

(By the way, in 2012 I rated the novel with rounded-up four stars, based on memory of my first read in the 1990s. Well, obviously I am maturing...)

Two-and-three-quarter stars.

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Khrushchev by Рой Медведев
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[Khrushchev's] tireless activity confirmed that it was possible to change Soviet society from the top, given support from below."

I distinctly remember one morning in October 1964: my mother woke me up when it was time to go to school - I was a high-school freshman - yet instead of saying "Time to wake up!" she said "There is no Khrushchev any more..." During breakfast we listened to the radio: the speaker announced that Nikita Khrushchev was removed from all his posts and Leonid Brezhnev assumed the position of the First Secretary of the Soviet communist party - the supreme authority in the Soviet Union. Many readers these days will not know what Soviet Union was - one of the only two superpowers of that time, whose military might was equal to that of the United States, and whose thermonuclear weapons could annihilate all life on Earth. Any change in Soviet leadership was a momentous event that could affect every person in any country.

Roy Medvedev's Khrushchev (1982) is a great biography of the man who was the leader of Soviet Union for 11 years (1953 - 1964). The author, a famous Russian historian and political writer, is the twin brother of Zhores Medvedev whose Andropov I reviewed here two months ago. I like this biography much more: it is more detailed and rich in synthetic depth, probably because of the eighteen-year break between Khrushchev's disappearance from public life and this book's publication: the passage of time created a historical perspective.

The biography tracks Khrushchev's life from his hard-working youth in fields and mines, through service and political work in the Red Army, a string of promotions in the party structure crowned by becoming a candidate member of the Politburo in 1938. The author confirms Khrushchev's participation in the terror of Stalin's years - in those years party bosses simply had to order torture and murder of thousands of people, otherwise they were tortured and murdered themselves on other party bosses' orders - but does not provide any details.

During World War II about 25 million Soviet people died: several million because of the utter stupidity of the Supreme Leader (Stalin) who believed in his own infallibility and omnipotence, and further several million died with the Stalin's sacred name on their lips. Krushchev distinguished himself during his military service for his Fatherland and his Supreme Leader. While the events surrounding Stalin's death in 1953 are well known the author offers a detailed account of the power struggle that ensued. Khrushchev emerges victorious, assumes the top position in the party, and in February of 1956 gives the famous "Secret Speech" where he denounces Stalin for the long decades of his reign of terror: for massive repressions, tortures, and murders. In consequence several millions of prisoners have been liberated and mass rehabilitations of murdered or imprisoned people took place.

The author then presents a detailed - and totally captivating - account of Khrushchev's remaining years in power, from 1956 to 1964: the highpoints are the crises in Poland, Hungary, and Suez Canal, Khrushchev's visit to the United States in 1959, the Berlin crisis of 1961, the Cuban crisis of 1962, and the growing tensions between Soviet Union and China. I am planning to soon read and review books on these three last topics so I am not discussing them here.

There are fascinating passages in the text, for example, the account of Khrushchev's visit to Washington D.C, New York, Hollywood, and Iowa. The reader will certainly enjoy the few pages dedicated to Khrushchev's reactions to abstract art.

The discontent rising in the Soviet society in 1963-1964, the scarcity of goods, stagnant incomes, and the average party members' dissatisfaction with Khrushchev's methods and lack of results of his leadership created an environment where other members of the Soviet leadership decided to take matters in their hands and relieved Khrushchev of all his duties on that fateful day in October 1964.

Roy Medvedev's book is a fascinating political biography: a very highly recommended work.

Four-and-a-quarter stars.

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Slipping Into Darkness by Peter Blauner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...]it's the [...] weirdest case he ever heard of. [...] Girl's dead twenty years and her blood shows up on another body last week."

The setup of Peter Blauner's Slipping Into Darkness (2006) is indeed intriguing. Is the "girl" really dead? Did the murderer store her blood to leave it on another victim? Maybe the lab results are not correct? Another difficult review to write because one needs to be very careful not to divulge a spoiler. In fact, the readers who like the surprise factor in mystery/suspense/crime novels should not read the synopsis on the dust jacket - the publisher provides enough spoilers there. By the way, I have always been wondering why people want to know the entire plot, except perhaps the very last twist, before reading a mystery genre book?

The main part of the story takes place in 2003 but in a flashback to 20 years earlier we read an account of the interrogation of a murder suspect, a 17-year-old boy, conducted by Detective Francis X. Loughlin. The interrogation scenes are quite graphic as we witness the gradual breaking of the boy's willpower and resistance. The detective's maturity and experience make the terms of the duel quite uneven; the scene evokes images of a "duel" between a hunter armed with a high-power rifle and a deer tied to a tree trunk. Naturally, the boy is convicted of murder and sent to prison.

Now, 20 years later, the convicted murderer is released on technicality. While he is trying to have the conviction vacated, with the help of a streetwise lawyer working pro bono, Det. Loughlin is trying to put the murderer back behind the bars. The battle between the detective and the convict constitutes the main narrative axis of the plot. There is another murder and intriguing connections between the two cases emerge.

Unfortunately, as usual in the mystery genre, the plot gets less and less plausible as it unfolds. One of the best setups that I can remember slowly degenerates to become a disappointing denouement. The author uses some tired clichés of the genre, for instance, the 'rare disease cliché' or the sudden appearance of a person from the past. The penultimate conversation, instead of being powerful and dramatic as the author undoubtedly planned, sounds contrived and ridiculous.

On the plus side, there is a touching thread that involves Zana, a Kosovar young woman from Prishtinë. The reader will find some cool passages, for instance

"'Pretty sharp, lady,' he said.
'A lot of things become much more obvious in this world when you have a vagina.'
He nodded, acknowledging the universal truth of this [...]"

The author writes well, and the novel is very readable. Had the author conceived a solution worthy of the outstanding setup, it would have been an excellent novel of suspense. Even with all the implausibility I am recommending it.

Three stars.

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Ghosts by John Banville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The past was gathering even more thickly around me, I waded through it numbly like a greased swimmer, waiting to feel the chill and the treacherous undertow."

It was not supposed to be like this. I would have never expected that I would have to struggle to get through a John Banville's book. Yet I did. It took me three weeks to read Ghosts (1993) and the first hundred pages were the most difficult. Despite Banville's trademarks, extraordinarily accomplished prose and the underlying wisdom shining through page after page, I could not connect with the text. I did not understand the events and the characters sounded artificial to me, like empty templates, promises of something that might possibly come in the future. For instance, Alice and Flora: what are they about? Why should I care about seven castaways from a ship grounded on a coast of an island? Or about their intersecting the lives of Professor Kreutznaer and his "faithful companion" Licht?

Later, things began making a little more sense. A connection to Banville's The Book of Evidence is revealed. The motif of a (fictitious) French painter, Vaublin, and his Le monde d'or emerges. There are more extraordinary passages of prose like

"The world was luminous around him. Everything shone out of itself, shaking in its own radiance. There was movement everywhere; even the most solid objects seemed to seethe, the table under his hands, the chair on which he sat, the very walls themselves. And he too trembled, as if his whole frame had been struck like a tuning fork against the hard, bright surface of things."

or

"And somehow by being suddenly herself like this she made the things around her be there too. In her, and in what she spoke, the world, the little world in which we sat, found its grounding and was realized. It was as if she had dropped a condensed drop of colour into the water of the world and the colour had spread and the outlines of things had sprung into bright relief."

The thread of travel with Billy, first to the narrator's house, then to the ship, and eventually to the island will captivate the reader's attention. As will the cool story about a mayor of a Spanish village sitting for a painting.

Naturally, I don't regret that I persevered and finished the novel. While I am probably too obtuse to fully comprehend its meaning, I suspect that the author gives the reader a hint in the following passage:

"I would look out the window and see that little band of castaways toiling up the road to the house and a door would open into another world. Oh, a little door, hardly enough for me to squeeze through, but a door, all the same."

The charming story of the narrator's relationship with Mrs. Vanden reminds me of Cees Nooteboom, to me the best writer of literature for adults. Still, the beauty of prose remains the best aspect of Ghosts: Mr. Banville makes a worthy companion to James Joyce, Patrick White, or Vladimir Nabokov among the most accomplished masters of the English language. I still have a lot more Banville to read.

Three stars.


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Murder at the B-School by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"The kid was floating facedown in the whirlpool, naked, suspended at forty-five degrees in a limp, looming bird-of-prey pose. The whirlpool's circle of underwater seats had caught his toes."

As a college professor I like to read detective or mystery fiction with university-themed plots. Alas, it is very hard to find good novels in this genre. The beginning of Jeffrey Cruikshank's Murder at the B-School (2004) promises a lot: indeed the first chapters kept me glued to the book. But soon the plot lost its edge and already by page 55 I began turning the pages faster and faster wishing the book to end as soon as possible.

The dead kid floating in the whirlpool is Eric MacInnes, a third-year student at the Harvard Business School, heir of a very rich family. Captain Barbara Brouillard, also known as "Ms. Biz" for her no-nonsense, competent handling of cases, leads the investigation. The main character in the novel is Dr. Wim Vermeer, a fourth-year faculty, as yet untenured, in the business school. In the disgustingly cliché literary trick, Barbara and Wim conduct parallel investigations. This way, the author attempts to have both a police procedural and a novel describing tribulations of a young faculty at a prestigious university. Naturally, this does not work.

The struggles of an untenured assistant professor are portrayed with a degree of accuracy. No wonder: the author is a real-life professor in the Harvard Business School, and a distinguished author of books in his field of research. He knows the university environment inside out and he writes very well. Unfortunately - and that's the problem with 90% of all mystery books - while the author has a great idea for the setup of the novel the denouement falls way short of this reader's hopes. The novel has a particularly lame ending - I almost cursed out loud when reading the last fifty pages or so. Implausible and ridiculous are the tamest words that come to my mind considering that Dr. Cruikshank is a famous academician.

And now the worst: there are several totally incongruous passages in the novel that seemed like copied from some other book or advertising brochure. Just consider this:

"The Acura NSX, real green, with two seats and an excess of swooping body angles [...] there was the front seat, which urged you into a semirecumbent position. And once ignited, the car made two noises at once: a throb and a whine. When you stepped on the gas, the throb got bigger and the whine got higher. And because the engine was right behind you, almost square in the middle of the car, it seemed to be taunting you, behind your back. Egging you on."

And what about the passage about flying in old planes? Or the very long and touristy passages about visiting Puerto Rico? What are all these pages doing in this novel? And what is the relevance of the fact that Wim a descendant of the phenomenal 17th-century Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer? Dr. Cruikshank should know that an unusual, surprising literary component should eventually play some role in the plot.

To sum up: good, interesting bits about a young professor's ordeal at a famous university. As a mystery - almost complete failure, except for the beginning.

Two stars.



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