The Bomb Maker's Son

April 13, 2015
The title of Rotstein’s third novel featuring attorney Parker Stern (after 2014’s Reckless Disregard) is fitting: it’s an explosive legal thriller set largely in Southern California that will keep readers guessing until the end. After being coerced by his estranged mother (who happens to be a cult leader) into representing one of her friends from the 1970s—an anti–Vietnam War radical accused of domestic terrorism who has been a fugitive from justice for almost four decades—Stern becomes entangled in a deadly mystery that revolves around the 1975 bombing of a Veterans Administration building in Playa Delta, Calif., which killed four people. As potential witnesses for the defense are murdered, Stern must also deal with life-changing revelations about himself and his rebel parents. Memorable characters and themes that are just as timely today as they were in the ’70s help make this a deeply satisfying page-turner. Agent: Jill Marr, Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.

April 1, 2015
Defending an aging former radical who's turned himself in for a 1975 bombing proves to be a blast from the past for LA attorney Parker Stern (Reckless Disregard, 2014, etc.) in more ways than one. Parker can't well refuse to take Ian Holzner's case. Not because Parker's horrible mother, Harriet, who's called herself Quiana Gottschalk ever since she became an elder of the Church of the Sanctified Assembly, pops up out of nowhere to insist that he take it, but because he can't deny her clinching argument: Holzner is the father he's never known. Given his double responsibility as lawyer and son, Parker gives Holzner's defense everything he's got. He mends fences with his former girlfriend Lovely Diamond because she works at the law firm of dislikable Louis Frantz, whose status as a death-penalty defender Parker has to trade on in order to take the case. He labors in vain to unearth the trial transcript that sent Holzner's co-conspirator, Rachel O'Brien, who blamed the bombing on him, to prison for six years. He holds his nose long enough to question two other Holzner-O'Brien gang members: psychopathic Belinda Hayes, who testified against Holzner at O'Brien's trial, and lily-livered Charles Sedgwick, who's still doing hard time even though everyone knows he's incapable of making the bomb that was planted in the Playa Delta VA Hospital back in the day. He does his best to find some common ground with spluttering, self-righteous Holzner, who could pose convincingly as the client from hell. The result is a series of firecrackers and depth charges that go right on detonating after the defense rests. Guaranteed to appeal to nostalgia buffs who can't forget their activist days and fans of courtroom drama who demand surprise after surprise and don't mind seeing multiple cast members unmasked as radicals or undercover cops or killed off to provide them.

May 1, 2015
Parker Stern is a former child star and a former attorney whose trial career was disrupted before the series' start (this is the third installment) by a sudden and persistent case of stage fright. Stern gave up performing as a trial lawyer for the considerably less-stressful role of appellate lawyer. But he keeps getting yanked out of a quiet life by people who need investigative help. This time, Stern's own estranged mother (who was an abusive stage mother and would-be embezzler of the money he made as an actor) seeks him out, wanting him to represent a man who has spent 40 years on the run, a former radical suspected of planting a bomb in 1975 that killed four people. Stern, for reasons that won't be revealed here, takes on the case, and a courthouse bombing and continued mayhem follow. This legal thriller is high on action and plot twists but a bit unconvincing about Stern's fairly easy return to the courtroom. Still, this is a solid series with an unusual premise, and it has built a substantial following.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)