Customer Reviews

Fruitcake (Mira)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Attorney Gabriel Rose knows why he lost it when he sees his marital partner Mona in bed with his business partner Peter Cashen. It was not the lovebirds. However, seeing his infant Bella sitting on the floor near the duo playing with Peter's shoes sends Gabe into a rage. He assaults and injures Peter. Gabe is arrested, plea bargains, and spends a year in Rio Cosumnes Correctional Facility.

Out of prison, Gabe is still licensed to practice law in California, but has few clients. Currently, Gabe fills in for fringe attorney Rudy Herman who is honeymooning in Hawaii. Del Pritchard arrives in the Herman office holding a file filled with papers he claims will prove a fiscal conspiracy of major proportions. Gabe thinks the guy is a FRUITCAKE, but the wealthy man offers a five thousand-dollar retainer. Knowing he needs the cash, Gabe reluctantly agrees to look into the matter. That night, someone murders Del. Gabe feels he owes his deceased client, but has no idea what to do. As more corpses follow, Gabe is in the center of a potential banking scandal that might leave him dead or as paranoid as Del.

R.J. Kaiser has written several thrillers that have elated fans with their exciting plot and super characters (see PAYBACK and JANE DOE). The author's latest tale, FRUITCAKE, is a fantastic story that amateur sleuth fans will relish. The story line centers on Gabe's moral need to do what is right for his client even though he remains at odds with the state bar and the Sacramento police. Deservedly so, J.R. Kaiser is becoming a star that readers will clamor to read.

Harriet Klausner

As a burned-out paralegal, I love stories about down and out lawyers! Seriously -- as this novel begins, attorney Gabriel Rose, fresh out of jail, is babysitting a honeymooning friend's practice to earn a few dollars when a new client brings in a box of purported evidence and offers him a $25,000 retainer to help him unravel an evil banking conspiracy which the FBI and CIA won't touch. A cursory glance through the box convinces Gabe that his eccentric potential new client, Del Pritchard, has to be a fruitcake.

The next thing he knows, the evidence is stolen from the back seat of his car, a cop is shot at that scene and, across town, Del Pritchard is murdered by a masked intruder. Del's cousin Margo, a former attorney who is now a Hollywood insider, arrives in town and, as she and Gabe plod through the remnants of Del's evidence, sparks fly and a romance buds even as a psychotic Native American hit man stalks them. At the same time, a police detective with an axe to grind is trying to pin suspicion on poor Gabe, who is trying hard to earn Del's posthumous retainer check so he can keep the baby daughter he adores in milk. As Gabe and Margot dodge crooked lawyers, twisted bankers, pig-headed cops and, of course, the hit man on a mission, the body count rises. Gabe's journey toward putting his personal and professional lives in order while solving Del's case is great fun to read and highly recommended.

R. J. Kaiser's "Fruitcake" is his best work yet, and that's really saying something after the great reads he gave us with his two previous books "Payback" and "Jane Doe." If you've read Kaiser you know that his characterizations are always excellent, and he has once again surpassed himself, giving us characters that are brilliantly wrought. Their humanity or inhumanity is brought home to the reader throughout the action, creating a work whose characters become more and more interesting as the plot thickens, and of course, the plot does thicken!

Gabriel Rose and company find themselves in some unique situations and the reader is irresistibly drawn to keep turning the pages to see what happens next. I enjoyed it so much I started it again from Page 1! This is a really fun read, and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good book!

R.J. Kaiser has a formula and he's sticking to it. It almost always involves 6-10 characters whose lives become drawn closer and closer, told from each character's point of view, in short chapters that shift viewpoints quickly. There's almost always a love interest between a 'bad boy' who has gotten in trouble with the law to some degree, but as really a knight in slightly tarnished armor who is trying to win the affection of a woman who oscillates by the hour as to whether her knight is Mr. Right or not.

In other words, these are books for long airplane flights. Fruitcake is the best of his work because his two love interests are more compelling than usual (contrast to Payback, a book with a cracking plot, but who love interests don't seem like real people.)

This is the story of an attorney just released from prison from braining his wife's lover with a frying pan, who takes on a client who says he's being pursued by dark forces and gives the attorney a cardboard box of financial receipts, a big check, and then vanishes, only to turn up murdered. From there the plot gets complicated, and the attorney has to deal with a variety of menacing characters as he falls for a relative of the murdered man. Although some of the obstacles to the romance seem a bit improbable, the secondary characters are stronger than usual for Kaiser, as are the plot twists.

If you've got a cross country flight, Fruitcake is an enjoyable companion.

I thought this was a pretty good novel. It keeps you wondering what's coming next. I became a fan of Mr Kaiser after reading his previous novels and I must say he definitely entertains. I recommend this novel and I definitely suggest you go back and read his others, "Jane Doe" and "Payback". They're all good.

In this not-so-thriller, our hero Gabe, a Sacramento lawyer recently released from jail for conking his wife's lover on the head, is approached by the Del the "Fruitcake", who retains Gabe as his lawyer while hinting at a unspecified conspiracy of international proportions. Del is shortly thereafter murdered, and Gabe proceeds to investigate the Fuitcake's story in company with Margot, the dead man's niece and heir.

There are many problem's with this book, not the least of which is that Gabe inspires little sympathy, at least from me. His major strongpoint is the deep, abiding love for his baby daughter, whose custody he shares with a bitchy ex-wife. Beyond that, he's way too humdrum to be the hero of a 441-page paperback. And that's another problem, the book is far too long. The reader isn't given a clue as to the nature of the Great Conspiracy until well into the second half, and, when the Evil Plot is fully revealed at the end, it falls into the "So, what?" category. I mean, that's what we expect our banks to do, don't we?

Margot, and Gabe's relationship with her, are two more irritants. Margot is a perky lawyer-turned-Hollywood producer. Oh, please, how LA! No surprise, she's cute as a button, and her love affair with our non-hero takes a course as scripted as a class B movie. There's one scene where Gabe introduces her to Pug, the old and cantankerous (but with a Heart of Gold!) lawyer who had defended him on the assault rap, and who has since becomes Gabe's mentor. The verbal interplay between the characters at this meeting is so icky-predictable and corny that I was left estimating how many times I'd read or viewed the same dialog in previous books and movies. Five? Ten? Twenty?

The one interesting character and Gabe's authority nemesis, Sacramento Police Lt. Spencer "The Shinto Splinter" Shimota, has several walk-on parts as he dutifully and doggedly tries to connect Gabe to the latest crimewave. At times, Gabe was so insufferably annoying that I was left wishing that The Shinto Splinter might succeed. Spencer deserves a novel of his own.

The ONLY reason that I finished this clunker was to learn what comeuppance befalls the Archvillain of the piece, Dakota Jones. In the end, even that is an anticlimactic thud.

I cannot recommend this book unless you're shipwrecked on an isolated atoll, and this is the sole diversion that washes up onto the beach.