To The Last Page

Law is back at the centre of Mark Gimenez’s latest novel, when Chicago lawyer Beck Hardin packs up his career after the death of his wife and moves back home with his kids to small town life in Texas. A lot has changed in the twenty-four years since he left, and when Beck finds himself appointed judge of Friedericksburg, a small town founded on old German values, he runs up against the town’s elders and their inability to deal with modern issues of race, land and politics. The whole corrupt set-up is exposed through two main cases - a violent race attack by the town’s high-school sports star on a young Mexican boy, and the unsolved death of a sixteen year-old beauty queen, the daughter of an old friend of Beck’s. Despite the shock opening prologue – rather hastily described, but certainly achieving an immediate impact – The Perk settles down into an entirely different kind of pace from the high-octane action-movie machismo of Gimenez’s previous novel The Abduction . The more mundane e...

Preposterous though it is, you can’t help admiring the scale and ambition of The Abduction – a big, bold, in-your-face American blockbuster of a thriller. A kidnapped child at the centre of all this furore is Gracie, the tough-cookie daughter of an outrageously rich and successful family. Her father is a computer billionaire, her mother a high-flying, high-profile lawyer. When Gracie is abducted at a school soccer game, it inevitably turns into a huge media event, particularly when a reward of $25 million is offered for her safe return. But surprisingly the kidnappers don’t take the parents up on their offer and there is no ransom demand made. Eventually, the family have to come to terms with the fact that their daughter is almost certainly dead. However, Gracie’s grandfather – a grizzled Vietnam veteran, fighting to contain the demons of the past and the flashbacks that torment him through heavy drinking – has a mystical psychic connection with the child and is convinced that she is ...