THE EDGE OF GUILT might better be called the swamp or morass of guilt...but guilt there is

THE EDGE OF GUILT
DAVID MIRALDI
Kindle edition (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Heather was only fifteen when she died by suicide.
Her father wants justice.
The system wants silence.

After his daughter’s tragic death, Dennis is devastated, convinced that her psychiatrist is to blame. Desperate for accountability, he seeks an attorney to settle the score.

Enter Paul Schofield, a struggling attorney who impulsively takes the case, hoping for a quick settlement. But the deeper he digs, the more he uncovers buried secrets, conflicting loyalties, and ethical dilemmas that shake him to his core. As courtroom tensions rise, relationships fracture, alliances shift, and the line between justice and greed begins to blur.

Inspired by true events, The Edge of Guilt is a gripping legal drama that delves into the gray areas of justice, morality, and grief—captivating readers from the first page and resonating long after the final verdict.

Perfect for fans of Defending Jacob by William Landay, Reversible Errors by Scott Turow, and Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, this story blends courtroom suspense with emotional depth and real-world ethical complexity.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Legal dramas don't come much more grabby than a grieving father trying to wrap his head around his child's death. Failing that, he sets out to get revenge, or as he thinks of it, "Justice."

The big issue is an Eternal Verity: NEVER START A LAWSUIT IF YOU'RE GUILTY. Of what, well, look at Oscar Wilde if you just want a case study of why this is the world's worst idea. The author's a civil lawyer, so no doubt accustomed to lying clients. I'm not all the way convinced that isn't why there's a twist at the latter stages of the story...was that really a good idea is not settled in my mind.

The real characters here are the lawyer and the father. They eat all our attention, seemingly by design as there aren't any female characters including the dead daughter who speak much still less say anything important.

I won't say it was my favorite read of May 2025 but I never rolled my eyes and resisted picking it up. The comps above seem accurate to me. I liked the Landay book pretty much exactly the same intensity as I liked this one, and for similar reasons of moral complexity. If you like courtroom dramas, this definitely makes its bones there; if you're after a solid tale of grief managed poorly, here you go; if you like a surprise ending, the kettle's on in Author Miraldi's story kitchen.

PERSECUTION, trial by media and innuendo & how that destroys lives

PERSECUTION
ALESSANDRO PIPERNO (tr. Ann Goldstein)
Europa Editions
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: In a sprawling villa on the outskirts of Rome, the members of the Pontecorvo family have gathered for dinner. Leo Pontecorvo, an internationally revered pediatric oncologist, is forty-eight. His wife, Rachel, is a physician and the loving mother to Filippo and Samuel, two amiable pre-teens. The evening news is on in the living room but nobody pays it any attention until Dr. Pontecorvo's name surfaces from the background noise and a news item airs that will change the lives of the Pontecorvos forever.

Leo Pontecorvo has been publicly accused of a vile crime. A spotlight is turned on him that reveals the mistakes, regrets, and contradictions of a lifetime. Every detail of his private and professional life is about to come under scrutiny, to be debated by both friends and foes, by ravenous reporters and punctilious prosecutors. But Leo could bear all this if it weren't for the suspicious gazes of his wife and children. Surely they, of all people, believe in his innocence!

Alessandro Piperno is widely acknowledged as one of today's most talented European novelists. His voice is singular and shocking at times, yet always possessed of tenderness and enormous generosity of heart. His vision is broad and encompassing, his psychological insights penetrating and undeniable. In this deeply felt family drama, Alessandro Piperno paints a broad canvas and fills it with psychologically complex characters whom readers will instantly recognize and never forget.

Europa Editions provided this copy in a Goodreads giveaway. Thank you.

My Review: Words can not only hurt, not only damage...they can kill. They can annihilate, destroy utterly the target of the carelessly spoken or maliciously uttered or calculatedly disseminated words. They can blow up a life, a family, a career, a vocation, they can eviscerate the worthy and worthwhile work a person has done.

And what if they're true? What if they're not true? Half true? He said, she said? It doesn't matter at all. Words, when spoken, can only be forgiven but never forgotten.

Piperno's novel of a Jewish pediatric oncologist's fall from the pinnacle of his life-saving profession is profoundly unsettling. It is discursive in style, and it is peculiarly intimate because of that. Very few paragraphs lead directly to the subject allegedly at hand, but all of them, each of them, serves to build the image of the Pontecorvo world, that of Dottore Leo, la signora Rachel, the pre-teen boys, Telma the Filipina maid...all these intersecting, interlocking worlds are completely and finally and irrevocably smashed and cannot be restored, only re-formed. The tracks in the thickets of words Piperno creates are like the game spoor a hunter follows, requiring patience and attention to interpret and encouraging the reader, the hunter, to look around carefully, to attend to the landscape as much as the path.

Ann Goldstein ably translates the Italian text in such a way as to suggest the varying uses made of familiar and formal address. It's a very hard thing to do, and it's impressive to see the job done so well. Part of the job of a translator is to create the mood of the original in a different idiom...never does Goldstein do this better than in the passages where the snobbery and class-consciousness that Leo faces when others refer to or speak to his wife, daughter of an observant Jew who also happens to be a businessman, in contrast to his more assimilated, haute bourgeois background.

I was transported in the reading of this novel, though not to a lovely sweet cotton-candy land of milk and honey. (Frankly, that's always sounded revolting to me. Not to mention sticky.) I was immersed in the life of the disintegrating Pontecorvo family. I emerged after a catharsis feeling, oddly, buoyed up, able to see the shore and feel the water of the sad existence below me support me as I started for solid ground.

THE YELLOW BIRDS, a poet's first novel of the Iraq War

THE YELLOW BIRDS
KEVIN POWERS
Back Bay Books
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

WINNER OF THE 2013 PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION!

The Publisher Says: "The war tried to kill us in the spring," begins this breathtaking account of friendship and loss. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. In the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from constant danger.

Bound together since basic training when their tough-as-nails Sergeant ordered Bartle to watch over Murphy, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes impossible actions.

With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, THE YELLOW BIRDS is a groundbreaking novel about the costs of war that is destined to become a classic.

My Review: I do so wish publishers would stop using the phrase “destined to become a classic” because, even if I agree with them (in this case I do), it's so obviously a sales pitch that it's a turn off.

No one knows for sure what the future will consider a classic. No one in 1955 would've given The Lord of the Rings future-classic status. No one in 1851 would've known about Moby-Dick, it was such a flop! The Great Gatsby? Please! Out of print by 1940!

This book, fragmented like PTSD memories, written in deceptively simple sentences by a *shudder* poet of all things, earns my admiration for its beauty, its simplicity, its sheer raw emotional up-front-ness. It has these, and many other, things in common with books that have stood the test of time and become classics. It is a first novel; it is about a young man's journey into a unique hell of memory and the maze he travels even to imagine daylight guiding him out; it is, one strongly suspects based on the author's CV, a roman à clef. So far, so good, for the oddsmakers' guess it will become a classic; so did The Naked and the Dead, so did The Sun Also Rises, and so on. I think it will be a classic. I hope it will, and I offer this passage as support for my hope and conviction:

When we neared the orchard a flock of birds lit from its outer rows. They hadn't been there long. The branches shook with their absent weight and the birds circled above in the ruddy mackerel sky, where they made an artless semaphore. I was afraid. I smelled copper and cheap wine. The sun was up, but a half-moon hung low on the opposite horizon, cutting through the morning sky like a figure from a child's pull-tab book.

We were lined along the ditch up to our ankles in a soupy muck. It all seemed in that moment to be the conclusion of a poorly designed experiment in inevitability. Everything was in its proper place, waiting for a pause in time, for the source of all momentum to be stilled, so that what remained would be nothing more than detritus to be tallied up. The world was paper-thin as far as I could tell. And the world was the orchard, and the orchard was what came next. But none of that was true. I was only afraid of dying.”

That, for me, is a lovely moment of mortal fear's hyperreality-inducing sensory twist. Never having been in war, I can't say it's what a soldier would feel, but having been afraid for my life from external causes, I can say that is the kind of sharp-edged seemingly odd clarity of perception that happened to me. The author was a soldier in Iraq. I suspect he saw and felt these exact things, and because he's *gag* an MFA-havin' poet, he remembered them with extreme precision.

Kevin Powers is One To Watch. This book won the 2012 Guardian First Book Award; the 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (which recognizes books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures); the 2013 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction (a $5,000 award administered by the American Academy of Arts and Letters); and the 2013 Prix littéraire étranger Le Monde, given by the French newspaper Le Monde. I strongly suspect this could be the best novel we see from him unless he gets back on the authorial horse to do better than his previous best. I hope he does, and I pray it doesn't blight his ambitions to be so successful so early in his novel-writing career. I most urgently petition the Muses for his beautiful, beautiful talent to survive intact the horrors of commerce, where the agonies of war built a palace for him.

The 2017 film gets a solid 4 stars of five from me, and is available free to Amazon Prime members. Alden Ehrenreich, from that Star Wars movie that got so much hate, is Bartle; and Toni Collette plays his mom; and Jennifer Aniston plays Mrs. Murphy, the mother who entrusts her son to Bartle. All three, as well as the other actors, give very creditable performances in a script that was of decidedly less exalted quality than the novel was. Not bad, not great, better than average by a hair or two; that is not high praise. The story itself makes the experience of watching the film satisfying.