Buy Beach Road
at Amazon.comPlot: Tom Dunleavy has a one-man law firm in legendary East Hampton. But his job barely keeps him in paper clips. His principal clients make a living serving the rich. The billionaires and mega celebrities swarming the beaches already have lawyers on their payroll.
Then a friend of Tom's is arrested for a triple murder near a movie star's mansion. Tom knows in his gut that Dante Halleyville is innocent. Dante asks him to represent him in what could be the Trial of the Century.
Tom recruits Manhattan super lawyer Kate Costello to help. She's a tough hire, because Kate is his ex-girlfriend-but she agrees. In their search to find who really executed three locals, Tom orchestrates a series of revelations to expose the killer-and what emerges is staggering.
Review: After a 10 month layoff, I'm back to listening to audio books. I read the lukewarm reviews of "Beach Road", but decided to go ahead and make my own opinion instead of listening to others. The result: it was fair. The average review on Amazon.com is 3 stars, and I'd have to agree with that. Personally, the toughest part to get through was the first 30 or 40 minutes as the stage is set as there were some pretty cheesy cliches and other techniques used that had me thinking, "is this how the entire book is going to be?" It eventually settled down and got into a literary groove.
Liked the fact that each chapter was from a different character's perspective. Especially the courtroom scenes as we see the majority of Tom's performance from Kate's eyes, and vice versa. Also liked the fact that "Loco" was a mystery character you knew you'd been introduced to but couldn't figure out who he really was (the same goes for "BW", as referred to by Loco a few times during the book) because this set the stage for the twist, which I think was executed fairly well.
The majority of the reviews I read bashed the ending saying it was implausible and irrational...since I'm reading a piece of fiction, I'm not opposed to some incredulous things happening...and they were pretty incredulous. To the naysayers, I ask you: did you really want the book to end after the verdict of Dante Halleyville? This would have led to an all to familiar (and overused) ending, and would have been a letdown. I'm OK with the climax of the book.
The thing I need to understand is the relationship between JP and Mr. De Jonge...who played what role? I agree with most reviews that Beach Road isn't up to the normal JP writing, but it seems his name is the headliner that gets the book buyers attention and Mr. De Jonge did most of the work. I'm not sure what I think of this...probably a post for another day. It seems similar to buying an Infiniti, but realizing after the fact it had the engine of Ford Focus.
My biggest complaint is some of the extraneous information that didn't contribute anything to the story...my best example is the Steven Spielberg storyline. Still trying to figure out where that came from. Still, enjoyed the book enough to listen to the whole thing.
Verdict: 3 out of 5 stars.
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