Neither as meaty nor as finely drawn as Lescroart’s earlier and more emotionally complex thrillers, The Fall nonetheless fits the bill for a combination murder mystery/courtroom drama that dovetails with this country’s soaring racial tensions between police and African-Americans. The Fall deals with the first major legal case of Rebecca (“The Beck”) Hardy, daughter of Lescroart’s serial hero Dismas Hardy. The Beck is now an associate in Hardy’s law firm and gets her first chance at a murder trial in defense of one Greg Treadway, […]
A Tale of Loss, Redemption and the Human Condition
A challenging but tenderly rendered novel about the consequences of loss. Intertwined plots focus on the traumatized marriage of Vermont couple Laura and Terry Sheldon who two years earlier had lost their young twin daughters to a flood, and also on the fragile psychological state of 10-year-old Alfred, a young African-American foster child placed in the Sheldon’s home. The author successfully switches viewpoints from one character to the next, without losing the flow of the story and at the same time giving us an inside […]