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3.53 AVERAGE
3.53 AVERAGE
Lucas Kendrick appears at his estranged wife’s home after a mysterious seven-year disappearance, and is instantly shot. Nell Kendrick, charged with his murder, calls Attorney Frank Holloway to defend her. But Frank cannot prepare her defense alone. He needs a lawyer who is “death qualified”—able to defend capital cases. He appeals to his daughter Barbara, who, out of disillusionment with a profession prizing politics over justice, abandoned her practice five years before. Reluctantly, Barbara is plunged into a case involving chaos theory, the mysterious death of a researcher, and a politically motivated and hostile prosecutor. To complicate matters, Barbara falls in love with a mathematician whose help she seeks in unraveling the case.
I recently started buddy reading this book with a couple of friends here on GR and I've been enjoying it quite a bit. I'm now on the third book in the series. What I like about these is the father daughter dynamic between Barbara and Frank. They are both attorneys and they collaborate on the cases. They both have their flaws and they don't always get along, but there is a mutual respect there and I like the dialog between them.
Another thing I really like about this series are the courtroom scenes. There are always interesting things learned in these chapters about how trials are conducted and how things can be perceived and manipulated during trials. Certain aspects of the series—the courtroom drama and the investigations—remind me a great deal of Perry Mason.
I've been listening to these since the audio for the whole series is on Hoopla and I really like the narrator. I can totally picture that voice being Barbara's. The narrator also does a pretty good job with the other character voices, especially Frank.
This is a long series with 14 books, so I will probably not review every book in the series, but just the ones that make the most impression on me. The others will just get a rating. As for this book in particular, I liked the overall plot, even though the whole psychological experimentation thing was a little hard to believe at times, and I had issues with some things about the ending. I liked the characters and everything else enough to want to keep reading.
Review also posted at Writings of a Reader.
I recently started buddy reading this book with a couple of friends here on GR and I've been enjoying it quite a bit. I'm now on the third book in the series. What I like about these is the father daughter dynamic between Barbara and Frank. They are both attorneys and they collaborate on the cases. They both have their flaws and they don't always get along, but there is a mutual respect there and I like the dialog between them.
Another thing I really like about this series are the courtroom scenes. There are always interesting things learned in these chapters about how trials are conducted and how things can be perceived and manipulated during trials. Certain aspects of the series—the courtroom drama and the investigations—remind me a great deal of Perry Mason.
I've been listening to these since the audio for the whole series is on Hoopla and I really like the narrator. I can totally picture that voice being Barbara's. The narrator also does a pretty good job with the other character voices, especially Frank.
This is a long series with 14 books, so I will probably not review every book in the series, but just the ones that make the most impression on me. The others will just get a rating. As for this book in particular, I liked the overall plot, even though the whole psychological experimentation thing was a little hard to believe at times, and I had issues with some things about the ending. I liked the characters and everything else enough to want to keep reading.
Review also posted at Writings of a Reader.
challenging
mysterious
Barbara Holloway the main character doesn't come in till chapter 8 (in the 50 page range).....before that it's all backstory lead up to whatever case Barbara is going to take. The first part is from 2 POV and only one makes any sense, Lucas comes first and I almost put the book down after only reading 5 pages. Nell's I can understand up to a point but it seems as if a large chunk of this is missing and I am confused and annoyed which is not a good thing to be only 60 pages into the story such as the messy thing it is so far.
Miss Barbara is a brat! It's almost like she never quite grew up. She still hold all her childhood views and when faced with the fact that not everything is like that, that the real grown up world is not like the ideal world of her child hood she trows a fit and just refuses to see it that way and gets upset and pouts or runs away when things don't go as she wants or expects. She's a sullen little girl in a woman's body.
Goes from legal thriller to scifi mumbo jumbo towards the end that doesn't make a lot of sense. The ending itself was a bit of a let down and open ended with few answers.
Miss Barbara is a brat! It's almost like she never quite grew up. She still hold all her childhood views and when faced with the fact that not everything is like that, that the real grown up world is not like the ideal world of her child hood she trows a fit and just refuses to see it that way and gets upset and pouts or runs away when things don't go as she wants or expects. She's a sullen little girl in a woman's body.
Goes from legal thriller to scifi mumbo jumbo towards the end that doesn't make a lot of sense. The ending itself was a bit of a let down and open ended with few answers.
11/07 I listened to this on my mp3, and it always takes months because I listen in 5-15 minute chunks, not even on a daily basis. But I love the Barbara Holloway books, even though I don't typically read mysteries. I like the local flavor (set in Eugene, Oregon,) and the characters are well fleshed out and very human.
2 1/2 stars. I had a hard time picking this one back up which is why it took me so long to finish. Slow start, it picked up, then it kind of went crazy, then I was bored, then it was too far out, then the ending was stupid.
I like Kate Wilhelm's sf so thought I'd try this legal series about a crime solving lawyer. Seems promising, with the added bonus of being written in the early nineties. These days I find it very soothing to read about that time period when all I had to worry about was which scrunchie to wear to school.
What starts as a pretty boilerplate courtroom drama movies in some pretty fascinating directions. And Wilhelm was an ecstatic writer.
Not an earth shatteringly good mystery, but it passed the time.
I thought I'd enjoy this one more than I did, but it steered too close to sci-fi for me. I suppose every novel is in some sense a sci-fi or fantasy (there never was a Mr. Darcy, after all) but rather than positing "what if so-and-so killed so-and-so" (the typical mystery postulation) it ventured much, much further into sci-fi territory, creating an uncomfortable (for me) amalgam.
For some reason when thrillers do this (e.g. Crichton) it seems perfectly reasonable, if MacGuffin-ish, but when tossed into a legal mystery it seemed very out of place. (Eventually it steered into suspense thriller territory too, but too late to make everything seem all right again--if anything, it was just one more element too many, in an already long book).
I suspect the sci-fi elements are what interested the author, and the mystery is a vessel for containing them. She may be pleased, but it didn't work for me.
(Note: 5 stars = rare and amazing, 4 = quite good book, 3 = a decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. There are a lot of 4s and 3s in the world!)
For some reason when thrillers do this (e.g. Crichton) it seems perfectly reasonable, if MacGuffin-ish, but when tossed into a legal mystery it seemed very out of place. (Eventually it steered into suspense thriller territory too, but too late to make everything seem all right again--if anything, it was just one more element too many, in an already long book).
I suspect the sci-fi elements are what interested the author, and the mystery is a vessel for containing them. She may be pleased, but it didn't work for me.
(Note: 5 stars = rare and amazing, 4 = quite good book, 3 = a decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. There are a lot of 4s and 3s in the world!)
OverDrive note: The audiobook has a number of glitches where 5-10 seconds of audio repeats. I didn't adjust my rating for that.