Under Oath by Margaret McLean

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Quite early on in Victorian times, the authors of fiction realised their readers were fascinated by the way the machinery of the state actually works. So they began to write about the individuals and policing bodies given the responsibility of detecting wrongdoers. Once the criminals were caught, the braver authors moved on to the courts and punishment systems. From Dickens with the Pickwick Papers (Bardell v Pickwick) and Bleak House (Jarndyce v Jarndyce) onwards, it was into the jousting between lawyers with judges as referees and juries meant to decides on the facts and only the facts. This picked up speed when real lawyers decided they could add to the mythology of courtroom drama from the inside. The truth is that life in courts has always been tedious and dull. So the only way to make it even halfway interesting is to fictionalise. The first major figure out of the blocks was Earl Stanley Gardner. As most practitioners, he was bored by the reality and would wander round the offices and corridors of power (when he had them to himself) dictating the next exciting scene of Perry Mason’s cross-examination. We move forward through John Mortimer’s delightful Rumpole to the legal thrillers of John Grisham who prefers counting his millions to going into court. All of which brings me to Under Oath by Margaret McLean who has been a prosecutor and now teaches law at university.

Margret McLean showing her academic credentials

 

In judging books which contain big set-piece trials, there’s a certain irony in my choice of comparator. Instead of picking another legally qualified author as my touchstone, I choose Kate Wilhelm. Against this measure, I regret to say Margaret McLean comes out as an also-ran. The modern problem really started with Murder One, the television series which initially convinced the gullible that a real-time, blow-by-blow account of a criminal trial could hold everyone’s attention over hours of peak time. This ignores the fact that you can have too much of a good thing. Indeed, at 41 episodes and three major trials, viewers might just as well have been watching the real thing, just tweaked a bit to reduce the boring bits. You will notice no-one has tried to repeat the Murder One formula. All that talk and discussion of the law just weighs people down. Modern television shows either aim for laughs, like Boston Legal, or keep the court scenes to a minimum as in the various Law & Order series.

 

Yet Margaret McLean has gone for broke with more or less all the action taking place in or around the courtroom. She even has set-piece interlocutory applications where the attorneys cite cases to the judge and discuss the merits of some quite sophisticated legal ideas. After a while, I began to accelerate. I was sufficiently interested to see how the prosecutor would finally get the result, but I really could not face all the intervening stuff. Perhaps if it’s set as a study aid for her law students, they can read every last sentence and benefit. But as a lay reader, it was less than riveting even though she introduced dodgy FBI behaviour and other “excitement” in increasingly desperate attempts to keep us reading. The best way of dealing with the challenge of maintaining interest is to follow the example of Kate Wilhelm in the Barbara Holloway series. Although the first has a terrible genre-bending ending which should be ignored and the last two fail to show Barbara in full flow as a defence lawyer, the pattern is clear. You introduce everyone and work through the pre-trial preparation. This involves a significant amount of time exploring the lives of the series characters and, as the series develops, builds up a more general interest. There’s still a trial with some great cross-examinations and some clever legal manoeuvring. But it gets the potential boredom factor down to manageable levels.

 

You will therefore understand Under Oath is only for the die-hard fans of “pure” courtroom drama. I gather she has been working on turning this plot into a stage production. I think this would be doomed to fail. No matter how clever the dialogue, such plays are essentially static and rapidly grow boring. The only exception I can recall was Witness for the Prosecution which I saw during the 1950s. This was saved by the “I didn’t see that coming” ending, whereas Margaret McLean amply demonstrates that she’s no Agatha Christie in producing outrageous twists to arrive at her desired verdict.

 

A copy of this book was sent to me for review.

 

Heart of a Killer by David Rosenfelt

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Let’s start off with the headline. Heart of a Killer by David Rosenfelt (Minotaur Books, 2012) is one of the best thrillers I’ve read in the last twelve months. Take a moment to imagine I went online and deep-mined the various Thesaurus sites for all the synonyms that would extoll the virtues of a book and listed them here. Except, of course, that’s pure salesman’s puff. No matter how many ways I might try to say this is a very good book, it would be meaningless without the whys and wherefores. You need the facts.

Heart of a Killer is another thoroughbred from the stables where David Rosenfelt works as the trainer. He’s had this one in secret training for the last few months, getting it ready to jump out of the electric starting gate at such a speed, none of the other literary horses will be able to catch it. In terms of genre, this is a hybrid, combining a legal with a techno-thriller theme. As the Americans would say, the legal issue is a doozie. As I advance into old age, I’ve been following the development of the case law on body autonomy and death with dignity with an obvious personal interest. Should disease cause serious problems, it would be a relief if I could gently put an end to my life. Selfishly, it would avoid not just any personal pain, but also the burden of others having to watch my suffering. A small number of countries around the world are supportive of the desire to achieve a “good” death. The majority retain laws penalising not only those who attempt suicide, but also attaching liability to those who assist a successful suicide.

David Rosenfelt takes this issue to the next level and one, I confess, that had not occurred to me. Put simply, a daughter develops a serious heart complaint. Only a transplant can save her. Should the otherwise healthy mother be allowed to act as the donor? To act as a further complication, six years before the need becomes pressing, the mother admitted to the murder of her husband. In a land that continues to allow capital punishment, she avoided the death penalty and languishes in jail. Morally, this might change our view of her proposed self-sacrifice but, as the law stands, the state cannot facilitate her death, no matter what the politics of the day might say. Enter our legal hero, the underachieving Jamie Wagner, who has an impressive academic record, but is on a fast-track to obscurity in a top firm of attorneys. He’s rescued by three people. A senior partner instructs him to take on our prisoner’s case pro bono and his parents disapprove, insisting he withdraw. Whereas he would normally continue on his melancholic downward spiral, there’s an essential perversity when it comes to his parents’ wishes. This means he’s thoroughly engaged when he goes to the prison even though, legally, he doesn’t have a prayer. So his Plan B is to get her out of jail. Not the easiest of tasks. But there’s a parole hearing due and, if he could prove her innocent, she would be released pending an appeal against conviction. Enter Jonathan Novack who was the lead detective at the time of the arrest.

David Rosenfelt practicing an inverted facelock camel clutch

The techno element of the thriller is one we would all prefer to think is science fiction, but the reality is rather more real than most believe. Everyone knows about the dark arts of hacking at a theoretical level, but we carefully put a ring-fence around our fears. We can sleep easy in our beds when we think only our privacy is at risk. It’s inconvenient if someone steals our credit card details but we can recover from this. If there’s an attack on critical infrastructure, say the power grid, this could cause deaths, disrupt cities, and take a long time to repair. Needless to say, the investigation triggered by Wagner leads Novack to start looking at some computer frauds. This proves to be a Pandora’s Box particularly when it becomes obvious identities can be so easily manipulated once access to databases has been established. Except, of course, hackers don’t always stop at the theft of data when security systems are often so poorly designed. These villains can sit undetected inside computers for months if not years, learning how every aspect of the business and physical processes are controlled.

The structure of the book gives Wagner a first-person voice with multiple points of view in short chapters covering all the other players. It’s a very dynamic format, driving the story forward as the action rapidly escalates. I was hooked and swept through at a gallop. On the way, David Rosenfelt reveals a sly sense of humour and the occasional smile encourages us to keep up the pace. I’m not sure I’m convinced by our hero’s romantic interest in his client. We all know it can’t go anywhere. She’s either staying put in jail or lies dead to save her daughter. I think he would probably be less involved but, at my age, I know little about the young. Perhaps they really are this impractical in matters of the heart (sic). Nevertheless, put all this together and you arrive breathless at the end, collecting the prize money in the winner’s enclosure and retiring to he nearest bar to open a bottle of champagne. Read Heart of a Killer or miss out!

A copy of this book was sent to me for review.

Gods and Fathers by James LePore

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Gods and Fathers by James LePore (The Story Plant, 2012) is a roller-coaster ride. It may not get into the Guinness Book of Records for being the longest ride at a relatively short 272 pages, but it sure does produce high-class thrills. In a book sitting on shelves marked thriller with sub-genres in legal and political, that’s all you can ask for. So what’s it about? As the title suggests, this is mainly about families with a focus on fathers. The families involved straddle religious divides between Christendom and Islam, and within Islam between Sunni, Shia and the factions. On the barricades between families and their faiths, emotions run high, feuds persist over time and the desire for revenge is inexhaustible. Also in play are the countries. At the heart of all social contracts between citizens and their state is the notion of parens patriae: a fundamental public policy that the sovereign is parent to all its citizens and will step in where necessary to protect the weak and the vulnerable.

To show he means business from the first page, James LePore introduces Matt DeMarco, a tough attorney in his first major case, an honour killing. You can’t get more controversial in that even the Islamic mainstream disapproves, characterising it as an unfortunate survival from tribal cultures. The year is 1993 and our hero is given the task of running the first major trial in New York. The difficulty in such cases, of course, is that the lead attorney necessarily becomes a political player. The decision to prosecute is setting down a marker for the local community of a change in policy. From now on the intention is to treat this form of domestic abuse as a mainstream crime. This is the sovereign state of New York asserting its parental duty to care for wives and daughters at risk. For better or worse, Matt DeMarco does not hold back. He’s not into neutrality. He wants the result. When the jury convicts, a son faces sentencing for the murder of his sister.

We now jump forward to 2009. Matt is divorced. His wife has married Basil al-Hassan, a wealthy Syrian businessman who’s now stepfather to Matt’s son, Michael. When his girlfriend Yasmine Hayek is found shot dead, the first rush of evidence suggests Michael is guilty. With money no object, Basil gets a top firm to represent his stepson. Because of potential conflicts of interest, Matt is unable to remain in the prosecutor’s office. As the investigation continues, we learn there’s a lot more to this killing than meets the eye. There’s a United Nations investigation team on the ground and the CIA has an interest. When the first NYPD officer falls in the line of duty, interests coincide. Matt finds himself more at home with the homicide and other detectives he’s known over the years. They have to find a way of working through the political minefield to get enough of the truth to save those involved from further harm.

As background, President Bashar al-Assad has been in power since 2000. A controversial moment came in 2005 when Rafik Hariri, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, was assassinated. There’s long been suspicion this death was ordered by Syria. The extent to which this death should be investigated by the international community was considered. As always there were strong differences. Some countries routinely promote a policy of non-intervention in the affairs of another sovereign state. At the other end of the spectrum, states promote universal justice and the need for the guilty to be brought before the International Criminal Court. These are difficult issues for America because it’s against the notion of any supranational court asserting jurisdiction over its own citizens, particularly those acting in a military capacity. Yet it also wants to deal with Syria as one of those states more directly involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict. This makes the Syrian connection to the death of Yasmine Hayek even more difficult. Add in the fact that her father, Pierre Hayek, had secretly been a member of a Christian militia responsible for a savage attack on a Moslem ghetto and the State Department, Justice and the CIA prefer Michael to plead. That allows them a relatively free hand. If charges were dismissed and Syrian nationals were to be implicated. . .

By the time we’re done, bullets, RPGs and bombs have left their marks. That’s the one thing fathers have in common. If you threaten their children, they get emotionally involved. If one of them like Matt has military training, he can be more effective than the usual parent. With the covert backing of the NYPD, the results might surprise the governments of the states and countries involved. For all this is a relatively short book, it manages to pack in both a lot of action and enough background so we can understand the characters as people. None of those more directly involved are simple stereotypes. We’re allowed the see shades of grey and the complexity of situations. While it may not say that much about the political and moral implications of events, Gods and Fathers does enough to make this a superior legal and political thriller.

A copy of this book was sent to me for review.