Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

© 2007 by Jon L. Breen

While lawyers don’t dominate crime fiction as much as they do politics, they continue to be well represented among mystery writers and fictional sleuths. The first seven titles considered below all have lawyer protagonists, and all but two are written by lawyers.

**** Lisa Scottoline: Daddy’s Girl, HarperCollins, $25.95. Natalie Greco, a young University of Pennsylvania law professor, agrees to deliver a lecture at a minimum-security prison, where a riot breaks out and she becomes the recipient of a dying guard’s cryptic message to his wife. The neatly constructed mystery plot is a vehicle for Scottoline’s ever-present humor and her recurring themes of law versus justice and family dynamics, the latter illustrated by Nat’s relationship with her domineering father, her “man’s woman” mother, and the in-sensitive and juvenile brothers with whom her clueless boyfriend gets along all too well.

*** Margaret Maron: Hard Row, Warner, $24.99. Speaking of family relationships, no series depicts a larger extended family tree or concentrates more on domestic concerns than the saga of North Carolina’s Judge Deborah Knott. The plot concerns the plight of undocumented migrant workers and the murder of an unidentified man found one body part at a time in the rural countryside. Defendants met in brief visits to the judge’s courtroom include two men tried jointly for assaulting each other in a barroom brawl and an able-bodied driver whose car was towed for parking in a handicapped space. Appropriate chapter epigraphs are drawn from the 1890 book Profitable Farming in the Southern States. A solid entry in a distinguished series.

*** Richard North Patterson: Exile, Holt, $26. San Francisco lawyer David Wolfe, whose fiancée is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, defends an old girlfriend, Palestinian activist Hana Arif, on a charge of directing the suicide-bomber assassination of the prime minister of Israel. Of the books under review, this is easily the first choice for trial buffs, with a hundred pages of excellent courtroom give and take. A thorough and even-handed airing of both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute adds interest to a large-canvas novel with enough matter to justify its 556 pages. In this case, the romantic complications and travelogue notes often used for padding are an organic part of the whole.

*** Mercedes Lambert: Ghost-town, Five Star, $25.95. The third novel about Los Angeles attorney Whitney Logan, following Dogtown (1991) and Soul-town (1996), had been seeking a publisher for several years when the author (pseudonym of Douglas Anne Munson) died in 2003. The portrait of the dark side of L.A. is superbly done, and both Whitney and her film-crazed ex-prostitute legal secretary Lupe Ramos are engaging characters. Client Tony Red Wolf, a member of the city’s large Native American community, is accused of the beheading murder of Shirley Yellow-bird. The case is solved, but the highly unconventional ending, open to varying interpretations, will delight some readers while disturbing or irritating others. Michael Connelly writes a brief introduction, and the author’s literary executor, Lucas Crown, details the author’s difficult life in a lengthy afterword.

*** Harlan Coben: The Woods, Dutton, $26.95. New Jersey county attorney Paul Copeland, while raising a six-year-old daughter as a single parent, explores various mysteries of his family’s past, notably his teenage sister’s disappearance and presumed murder at the hands of a serial killer decades before, and prosecutes two rich white college boys accused of raping a black stripper. Whatever you think of the combination of wise-guy humor (including bizarre character names like Flair Hickory and Cingle Shaker) and heart-on-the-sleeve emotion, Coben’s gift for complex plotting and compulsive readability cannot be denied.

** Paul Levine: Trial and Error, Bantam, $6.99. In their fourth appearance, Miami lawyers Steve Solomon and Victoria Lord, partners and lovers, wind up on opposite sides when she is appointed to prosecute Gerald Nash, nephew of the State’s Attorney, on a felony murder charge. Allegedly, Nash’s accomplice in a dolphin liberation was shot by the aquatic theme park’s owner. As usual, Levine is very funny, and the story moves along nicely until the professional and personal climaxes sacrifice credibility for feel-good tidiness.

** Michele Martinez: Cover-Up, Morrow, $23.95. In her third case, federal prosecutor Melanie Vargas investigates the mutilation murder of Suzanne Shepard, a New York TV personality who exposes celebrity scandals. The plot and procedural details are interesting enough, but the hyped-up suspense and soap-opera elements are overdone, the prose and dialogue mostly flat. An exception is this wicked morsel of media satire, a comment from the victim’s producer: “We believe the best way to honor Suzanne’s memory is with innovative coverage of her murder. Please don’t interfere with our grieving process.”

*** Lloyd Biggle, Jr.: The Grandfather Rastin Mysteries, Crippen & Landru, $29 hardback, $19 trade paper. The octogenarian sleuth of Borgville, Michigan, first appeared in a 1957 issue of AHMM and made eleven appearances in EQMM between 1959 and 1972. These dozen are joined by two previously unpublished additions to a small-town series offering warmth, charm, and devious plotting. The first eight have headnotes by the author, who died in 2002, and his children contribute a brief introduction.

*** Aaron Elkins: Little Tiny Teeth, Berkley, $23.95. Skeleton Detective Gideon Oliver joins an Amazon River cruise arranged by a secrets-bearing botany professor surrounded by those who hate him most. Elkins has done stronger puzzle plots, but background and humor carry the day. The introduction to the travelers of the spaced-out expedition guide is one of the funniest scenes in recent memory.

From Rue Morgue Press come reprints of two books that are recent by the publisher’s preservationist standards: Stuart Palmer’s 1951 Hildegarde Withers novel Nipped in the Bud ($14.95) and Catherine Aird’s 1967 English village mystery A Most Contagious Game ($14.95). Both contain introductory notes by publishers Tom and Enid Schantz.