Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Burroughs' last tape
The final journals of Beat legend William S. Burroughs reveal the kinder, gentler last days of an "evil old man."
By Gary Kamiya
[02/25/00]

Reviews
"A Trip to the Stars" by Nicholas Christopher
A kidnapped little boy, his lost aunt and a fantasy about people finding themselves in the days of flower power.
By Polly Morrice
[02/25/00]

Pros and amateurs
One way or another, men still expect to pay for sex -- and women pay for it, too, by keeping their financial goals low.
By Ann Marlowe
[02/24/00]

Forced crossing
An involuntary traveler across the gender line -- and the first man who went under the knife to become a woman.
By Pam Rosenthal
[02/24/00]

Ivory Tower
Priceline U.
Make me an offer: At eCollegebid.org, students name their price for tuition. You may get a cut-rate deal -- at a no-name school.
By Brian Braiker
[02/23/00]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The book is set in San Francisco, but it would fit easily into the Boston that produced Edwin O'Connor's "The Last Hurrah" and James Carroll's "The City Below." Lescroart always gives the sense of a society teeming with civil servants of various temperaments and ethnic backgrounds. Every once in a while a politician or two get thrown up out of the murk. There are, among others, a Jewish African-American head of homicide, a liberal Irish candidate for governor, a sexually frustrated corporate VP, an understanding bartender, a broken-down but invaluable old alcoholic attorney, lots more cops and lawyers and assorted scheming lobbyists.

The plot concerns gasoline additives. It turns out you don't need them. Unfortunately, this revelation comes in a passage that seems to be italicized solely to indicate lazy storytelling. But aside from that lapse the narrative moves along at a nice jog-trot. Lescroart is a very loose, baggy writer. He is shrewd yet generous. He can actually get inside a lot of different characters and has the gift of making more than one of them look in the right at the same time. He is great fun to read. In other words, you can tell he's not a lawyer.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - -- - -- - -- - -- -

Barry Siegel's world is much narrower and drier, filled with moral quandaries that can be a bit obscure to the layperson. He makes you relieved that you are a layperson, in fact, and can just come out and say what you think.

In Siegel's fiction, words not uttered -- on or off the stand -- are more important than those that are. Where "Nothing but the Truth" is immediately anchored by the wife's distress, Siegel's latest novel, "Actual Innocence," is haunted by an earlier quandary of defense attorney Greg Monarch's. In a gas station parking lot, a psychopathic killer had told Monarch he'd murdered a 7-Eleven clerk, and Monarch had approached the DA, without revealing any names, to arrange for the man's commitment to a mental hospital. But the DA, interested solely in a prosecutable case and counting on Monarch's desire to get this lunatic off the streets before he killed again, wouldn't agree, leaving Monarch paralyzed: He could not violate attorney-client privilege, however the relationship had come about.

In Siegel's previous mystery, "Perfect Witness," the eponymous witness carries the plot on her strong, lively, devious, sociopathic back. The book is thoughtful and twisty -- surprisingly poised for a fiction debut. In "Actual Innocence," the female-trickster role is divided between two women: a tough-old-gal witness and a convicted murderer awaiting execution who just happens to be an old girlfriend of our hero's -- a girlfriend he had for three years, who was driven insane by the urge to write and ended up waving a knife in front of a cat. The book is handicapped right off by this sillier premise.

The best sections are on how evidence can be cooked up -- and how it can stay cooked despite a lot of good intentions. Like Lescroart, Siegel tells his story from different points of view, but the effect is more committeelike than societal. He is, however, better than Lescroart at hinting around at, and then explaining, the environmental hanky-panky that gives the book its up-to-date feel. "Actual Innocence" is clumsier than "Perfect Witness." But it will still encourage those who are always on the lookout for another legal-thriller writer one can actually read. (Sometimes I suspect that publishing houses will put out anything with a legal term on its title page. If you don't believe me, take a look at Brad Meltzer's latest.)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - -- - -- - -- - -- -

In Steve Martini's new book, "The Attorney" (huh? as if any of his many other books featuring Paul Madriani couldn't have been called that), the cross-examination of our hero's girlfriend occurs later on in the book. She is the director of an agency that investigates child abuse, and she has given him confidential information concerning an accusation against a client. We've all been trained to accept egregious violations of rules, especially in dutifully commercial plots like this one, so it's nice to see some consequences for a change. And certainly there is energy in Martini's very colloquial present-tense narrative. But the writing is awkward. Worse, the setup feels very strained. I know a legal thriller is supposed to be preposterous, and I don't mind when some of the seams show, but I don't want the buttons popping off and hitting me in the eye.
salon.com | Feb. 25, 2000

Jacqueline Carey's column on mystries runs every month, alternating on Fridays with Ann Hodgman on cookbooks, Melanie Rehak on poetry and Polly Shulman on science fiction and fantasy.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon