ALL GUILTY ANYWAY

In Johnson’s novel, a rookie lawyer balances her principles and personal ambitions with the realities of the justice system in a complex case involving immigration law and allegations of domestic abuse.

Ivy Collins is fresh out of law school and has only just begun practicing as an attorney. Although her father is a successful and well-connected lawyer with a “mega firm” in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, Ivy is striking out on her own with Lester “the Truth” Williams. He runs a scrappy operation, based in a seedy part of town, that makes its money on plea deals, and he never takes cases to trial. When the public defender’s office farms out Sonia Cabrerra’s case to the firm, it seems like a done deal: A videotaped interview with Sonia’s son, Hugo, in which he shows his injuries and identifies his mother as his abuser is so damning that the state prosecutor initially refuses to offer any plea at all. A bit of digging soon reveals layers of complexity. Sonia, a Guatemalan immigrant and itinerant coffee plantation worker, is Indigenous, and her first language is not Spanish or English but the Mayan Mam language, which raises questions in the case about language comprehension and differing cultural norms. She’s also pregnant and in delicate health, which demands a speedy trial. If she pleads guilty, however—or pleads her innocence and loses at trial—she’ll lose custody of her baby. Despite her inexperience, Ivy is determined to do whatever it takes to discharge her duty, do right by her client, and satisfy her own professional ethics.

Johnson’s smart novel will engage readers with its command of the legal questions at hand and its grasp of contemporary issues. Any legal drama can outline the elements of a trial and describe their relative significance, but this novel does so with an unusual crispness. The novel particularly shines in its exploration of the legal and social components of 21st-century immigration. The threat of deportation hangs over the defendant and several other characters, and the narrative details both the complexity and frustration inherent in the U.S. legal system, even for documented immigrants. Sonia’s Indigenous identity also cuts through the misguided notion that migrants south of the U.S. border are an undifferentiated group of Spanish-speakers with uniform motivations and desires. Most importantly, the text is cleareyed and sympathetic about the precarity in which immigrants live, especially as the mere possibility of deportation can leave them vulnerable to many types of harm, including labor abuse and sexual assault. The narrative displays a keen awareness of how a judge’s or prosecutor’s “discretion” depends on personality, mood, and time of day as much as the facts of a case, and how this reality can have devastating effects on the lives of those who stand before the law. The text would have benefited from a stronger copy edit to address a number of distracting typos, but that doesn’t detract from this novel’s tight plot, sympathetic characters, and well-developed themes.

A brisk but thoughtful and timely legal thriller.