Keen, sobering account of how the legal system really works.
As a public defender, a young lawyer fresh out of school learns how the legal system really works.
Television makes it look so easy. A smartly dressed lawyer comes up with a clever ploy or finds a key witness at the eleventh hour, snatching victory so that justice prevails. In reality, as Farmer’s novel illustrates in occasionally harrowing fashion, the American legal system is a hodgepodge of overworked public defenders, self-righteous judges and endless paperwork in which justice is often a happy accident. Law school lessons still dancing in his head, Paul Fields becomes a public defender in Louisville, Kentucky. He quickly gets disabused of his ivory-tower vision of the law as he descends into Kentucky’s Byzantine legal system and discovers how things actually work. Along the way, he picks up a girlfriend, Megan, who winds up helping him investigate a dandified judge nicknamed Lil’O and a crooked cop, who are running an illegal scheme from Acme Supply, a dirty company of which the judge is president. Meanwhile, in court, he has to contend with Heath, a smug prosecutor who cares only about advancing his political career. Farmer’s novel is an eye-opening, sometimes-uncomfortable trip through one state’s legal system that will make doubters out of anyone who naïvely thinks justice always triumphs. Farmer, a former public defender and prosecutor, clearly knows his way around the law, and the book rings with authenticity. The story moves along briskly, occasionally becoming too technical as Farmer lays on the legalese. He keeps the Lil’O case percolating on the back burner even as Fields becomes involved with other matters. Until he learns that “things are what they are” and that he can’t change them, Fields flounders at his job. What’s initially fascinating but ultimately disturbing is how rigged the American legal system is against the poor and downtrodden and how justice for them depends solely on their luck in getting a public defender who cares enough. Sadly, after reading this, one suspects that’s rarely the case.
Keen, sobering account of how the legal system really works.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497520639
Page Count: 296
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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