PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... a tender, closely observed and often surprising novel that achieves the intimacy — and occasional randomness — of a diary ... readers anticipating another artful courtroom thriller like Guterson’s prior book may find their expectations upended. In this novel, Guterson is not really writing about who done it, or even why. His subject is family love, and its silent passions grip the reader like a steady, racing current ... Guterson is the kind of writer about whom people used to say, when there were such things, \'I’d read him, even if he wrote the phone book.\' Every sentence has a graceful weight and meter and is illumined by a subtle intelligence that makes his descriptions arresting but never showy...Guterson also exhibits a perfect ear for the political rants that so many Americans feel authorized to engage in from both sides of the political spectrum ... Yet for all these incidental pleasures, with the first 70 percent of the novel hewing so closely to the details of the Harveys’ case, it is startling, even disorienting, when the trial comes to a precipitous close, and the case receives only passing mention in the remaining pages ... the fact that Guterson has chosen to fuse nonfiction elements with a work of the imagination seems to bear tribute to the power of creative acts — in particular their ability to render meaning from the shock of incomprehensible events.
Olen Steinhauer
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Middleman is smart and entertaining and consistently intriguing, clipping along in brief chapters, somewhat reminiscent of the novels of James Patterson, and often animated by lovely, spare descriptive writing ... Yet because the premise of The Middleman is so audacious and because its point of view is fragmented, the novel doesn’t fully exhibit the propulsive force of some of Steinhauer’s spy fiction ... What makes up for that is the neat feat of asking serious political questions without burdening the suspense. In an era of rising income inequality, of unlimited corporate spending on campaign messaging that allows the richest forces in our society to gain unprecedented political power, of voters left and right rallying to outcries about a corrupt system and Washington as a swamp in search of a drain, why can no unity be forged between the viewers of Fox News and MSNBC, who instead prefer mutual vilification? ... The Middleman is a very good trip.
Laura Lippman
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewWilde Lake is engrossing, suspenseful and substantial, its wit easing a sober, somewhat elegiac air. Lu is surrounded by loss, not only of the utopian dream but of so many people in her life: her mother, her husband, her brother’s best friend (dead of AIDS). And then there’s the lingering shadow of the three homicides — the killing on AJ’s graduation night, her father’s prosecution and the Drysdale case — that tie together past and present ... the conclusion of Wilde Lake is not its high point. Lippman artfully exploits the expectations of mystery readers to augment her plot’s surprises. But too much has been hidden without good reason, both by the characters and by the author.
