News Alert: Publishers Weekly Calls Hush Money a Stellar Debut

My first book review–ever–is a starred one from Publishers Weekly. I’m thrilled! Here it is:

Near the outset of Greaves’s stellar first novel, Hush Puppy, a healthy champion show horse, suddenly drops dead. Hush Puppy’s vet suspects the horse was poisoned and the animal’s owner, Pasadena socialite Sydney Everett, faces charges of fraud. Attorney Jack McTaggert agrees to defend Everett, but his doubts about his client’s innocence increase after he learns that another of her animals died five years earlier, netting Everett a $1 million insurance payout. Meanwhile, the lawyer must deal with a civil case involving a blue-collar worker suffering from terminal leukemia unable to get coverage for a new procedure. The insurance fraud case soon turns deadly for humans as well, placing McTaggert directly in the crosshairs both of the police and the criminal behind the plot. Greaves makes the most of his 25 years as a trial attorney in relating courtroom tactics. The combination of confident writing and a determined and ethical protagonist add up to a winner.

Kesey & Me

With the fiftieth anniversary of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest almost upon us, I’d like to share a personal reminiscence about one of my all-time favorite authors, the great Ken Kesey.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to observe that the reading experience is not only a subjective one, but is highly situational.  By that I mean that reading The Catcher in the Rye at age fifteen is a fundamentally different experience than reading it at age forty.  Because while books do not age, their readers, and the world their readers inhabit, surely do.  And when the right book and the right reader meet at the right time under the right circumstances, magic happens. Continue reading →

So You Want to be a Writer?

Two recent events got me to thinking, yet again, about this whole novel-writing business, and about how fortunate those of us who do it for a living truly are.

First, I was asked to author an essay for publication in a popular legal magazine.  The essay deals generally with the business of penning a legal thriller, but specifically with the odds of any one lawyer – or any one person, for that matter – making it into print with his or her maiden effort at book-length fiction.  The assignment required a modicum of research into the (opaque, and often contradictory) mathematics of book publishing, the results of which were, in a word, sobering.

Continue reading →