Abandoned Heart - Hardcover

Parrish, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525941614 ISBN 13: 9780525941613

Publisher: Dutton Adult, 1996

Synopsis

Victimized by a tremendous miscarriage of justice after her three-year-old daughter's rapist escapes conviction, Kate O'Dwyer is forced to take matters into her own hands and plot the man's death. 40,000 first printing. $40,000 ad/promo.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

Parrish puts his Joshua Rabb series (Nothing But the Truth, 1995, etc.) on hold for an equally stolid two-act legal melodrama tracing the fallout from a most heinous rape. Act One begins when lace-curtain Boston transplant Mary Kate O'Dwyer takes 16-year-old working girl Donna Alvarez into her home in Scottsdale, planning to adopt her legally. Before the final papers can be filed, Donna's former pimp tracks her down in Arizona and peddles her to sex-starved lawyer Philip Wilkott and his rough-trade lover Grant Felsen, who break into Kate's house and rape both Donna and Kate's three-year-old daughter Jennifer. When preliminary tests indicate that Wilkott's infected Jennifer with the AIDS virus, Kate's boyfriend goes wild, beating Wilkott's name out of the pimp. DNA testing proves that Wilkott was the rapist, but Wilkott's well-connected father gets the case thrown out on a technicality. These early scenes, though marred by nonstop preaching and some intolerable dialogue, work hard to whip up sympathy for the decent heroes, whose thirst for justice is thwarted at every turn by the law. It's in Act Two, which begins when Kate decides to take the law into her hands by killing Wilkott, that things go wrong, and not just for Kate. Kate's plans don't pan out exactly as she'd hoped (Parrish inexplicably throws away his biggest scene here); Wilkott Sr. presses for her prosecution anyway; and suddenly everybody in the legal system who'd been ganging up on her before turns a smiling face to her. The irredeemable villains place themselves beyond the pale by their racist, anti-Semitic, anti-feminist slurs, and the potentially explosive legal debate trails off in a series of skirmishes that show justice rousingly if not very convincingly triumphing over the law. There'll even be reprieves for Donna and Jennifer, as if tenderhearted Parrish couldn't bear to take leave of Scottsdale without righting every wrong. Like-minded readers will lap it all up. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

At first, it looks like the system is working, when 16-year-old former junkie Donna Alvarez becomes foster child to Kate O'Dwyer, who has recently relocated to Scottsdale, Ariz., with her three-year-old daughter, Jennifer, following a quickie annulment. But in his relentlessly grim and high-minded fourth legal thriller (after Nothing But the Truth), Parrish skewers the entire justice system, indicting liberal policies that allow the guilty to walk while damning conservative biases that favor the privileged. When Donna's ex-pimp finds business deteriorating, he hooks her on heroin again and sells her to two men for the night?one of them a "respectable" lawyer, who also rapes Jennifer. When early tests reveal that Jennifer may have been infected with HIV, Kate turns for comfort to Mike Fallon, a hungry lawyer who, having just recently passed the bar, finds himself forced to take whatever unsavory cases come along. This reads like a thinly veiled polemic against the suppression of questionably obtained evidence as the beleaguered Kate undergoes more reversals of fortune than Claus von Bulow. With the legal system and her church letting her down, a bleak picture is sketched of a not-too-distant future, where more and more individuals will take vengeance into their own hands. There's plenty to chew on here, but Parrish frequently aims too high; the religious overtones are particularly heavy-handed. Amazingly, however, the reader keeps turning the pages, anxiously looking to see if some semblance of justice?and whose?will finally prevail.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dutton Adult
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0525941614
• ISBN 13: 9780525941613
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368