Tough mandatory sentences give prosecutors a powerful threat in persuading defendants to plead guilty to lesser charges, or to serve as witnesses against others.
These opening sentences give you a feel for her work: Hempel's narrators are smart, damaged loners whose lives have a sense of being salvaged from a wreck.
As the investigation leads to Oliver's ex-wife and his girlfriend, Marlow begins to transgress the ethical boundaries of his profession, but Kostova's precisely constructed sentences give an air of detachment to what should be passionate love stories.
The curt, factual sentences give an effective sense of a damaged and dysfunctional mind, but they repel emotional engagement with the novel and offer no context for an intolerable situation.
Much of Forcelli's new job involved working with so-called coöperators defendants who, in return for lighter sentences, give federal prosecutors information not only on their own case but on everything they know about any criminal activity.
When Claire washes up on a foreign shore, brutal, utilitarian sentences give way to lush descriptions of nature: "The slate gray sea roiled, scraping the narrow strip of sand rhythmically, tugging at the beach grass, digging and sucking loose the rocks at the shore's edge".
