Review of Ferdinand von Schirach's The Girl Who Wasn't There

The Girl Who Wasn't There, by Ferdinand von Schirach (Abacus, June 7, 2016)

The thing about Ferdinand von Schirach is that nobody writes the way he does. His style is cool, distant and spare, but it creeps up on you, and suddenly it's immediate and searing.

I really didn't know where I was with this book when I started it. For nearly half the pages, it's the story of Sebastian von Eschbach, from boyhood to about age 50. He grows up on an estate, with his distant parents. He is deeply affected by a hunting experience with his father. He seems to have senses not shared by other people, including a perception of color so overwhelming he finds it almost unbearable. He becomes a celebrated photographic artist, exclusively sepia and black-and-white, then branching out into inventive multi-dimensional and video art exhibitions.

Though I didn't know where that first half of the book was going, I was still engrossed. Sebastian is an emotionally distant enigma, but one I wanted to solve.

German television dramatization of a story from
von Schirach's Crime

Then the book suddenly changes pace and direction when Sebastian is accused of murdering a young woman. Now the novel becomes the story of his defense attorney, Biegler, and Sebastian's trial. As with von Schirach's last novel, The Collini Case (see review here), the defense attorney must do his own investigation, because his client is largely uncooperative and seems indifferent to his fate.

Biegler's investigation and the trial make for a gripping exploration of the difference between perception and reality, the fallacies of what we believe and why. It makes some hard-hitting points about this in the context of modern-day geopolitics as well. It won't be a book for everyone, but if you think it might be for you, be prepared for the compulsion to read it all in one sitting.

Image sources: Amazon.com, Hörzu.de, nolimitformind.com.

Review of Michael Connelly's The Gods of Guilt

The Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelly

If you saw Matthew McConaughey play hustling criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller in The Lincoln Lawyer, you're not the only one. So many Los Angeles lawyers now have an office in the backseat of a Lincoln Town Car that Mickey comes out of the courthouse and climbs into the wrong Lincoln. That, and the opening courtroom scene, are two of the few comic moments in Michael Connelly's fifth series book, The Gods of Guilt (Little, Brown, December 2013).

Mickey has become increasingly melancholy since 2011's The Fifth Witness, when he ran for district attorney and lost (though his fans thank God for that). His teenage daughter, Hayley, lives with his first ex-wife and has refused to see him since a client he got off later drove drunk and killed two people. Mickey wonders how he can expect her to forgive him when, deep down, he doesn't forgive himself.

In addition to this personal angst, Mickey deals with a law practice in decline. The economy has forced him to let associates go, and only Jennifer Aronson remains, working on bankruptcies and foreclosures, while Mickey scrounges for criminal clients. When a "paying customer" accused of murder calls, Mickey knows it's likely he can make his "whole nut for the year."

The paying customer is Andre La Cosse, a man who designs websites and enables the operation of prostitutes (a "cyberpimp"). The strange thing is that the prostitute Andre is accused of killing, Giselle Dallinger, told him that if he ever needs a lawyer, Mickey Haller is the best. It turns out Giselle is actually a former client Mickey thought he knew well, Gloria Dayton (from The Lincoln Lawyer), though he didn't know everything he should have. In order to defend Andre, Mickey needs to investigate Gloria––as both victim of murder and long-ago accused.

In addition to his associate, Jennifer, Mickey is assisted by the usual gang of employees: case manager (and ex-wife No. 2) Lorna Taylor; investigator Cisco Wojciechowski, Lorna's current husband; his father's old law partner, David "Legal" Siegel; and driver Earl Briggs, who's working off legal fees he owes Mickey. Val Valenzuela, bail bondsman and process server, shows up. Writer Connelly's other series protagonist, Harry Bosch, who happens to be Mickey's half brother, does a cameo appearance. Unlike Scott Turow, Connelly tells us next to nothing about these returning supporting characters. In fact, how well do we really know Mickey? Over the course of the series, he hasn't used his narration to psychoanalyze himself. When he does talk about his feelings here, mostly about his personal gods of guilt and the jury who judges the guilt of his clients, he's unnatural and pompous.

Mickey is better when he focuses on how our legal system works, grinding down everyone ensnared in it or part of it, and the backstory of secrets, corruption and double dealing behind the current case. He shines when he shares his knowledge of LA (his restaurant talk makes me feel like booking a flight as well as a table). Mickey dazzles when he's working the angles for a client, interviewing witnesses, plotting legal strategy and performing in the courtroom. The Gods of Guilt is Mickey's detailed report of how he created his defense for Andre La Cosse and how it played out in court. It's a legal procedural rather than a suspenseful legal thriller. If you're looking for unsavory clients, dueling lawyers and a pragmatic, crafty Mickey who dances his socks off before a jury, grab this one.

Review of David Ellis's The Last Alibi

The Last Alibi by David Ellis

On Thursday, Della Streetwise will tell you about some sure-fire scares for Halloween. She'll also include some titles for those whom the name "Stephen King" inspires a mad scramble for the exit. Today, I have a suspenseful book that kept me up late, turning pages to see what in the world was going on and how it all would end. It doesn't pit its hero against rampaging zombies, a deadly virus, or a crazed killer. (Well, okay, sorta that last one; but, not in a way you'd expect, even after you read my review.) It takes place day-by-day in a Chicago murder trial. Flashbacks to six months earlier interrupt the trial and count down to the present, so we see how Jason Kolarich comes to sit at the defendant's table, and not in his usual role of defense attorney. Early on, Jason tells us he'll probably testify, but he's not sure if it will be enough to establish reasonable doubt. He's sure of only one thing—that when he testifies, he will not tell the truth.

Jason, a former college football player, was a prosecutor before he joined his best friend, Shauna Tasker, in Tasker & Kolarich. Now in his 30s, he grew up with his brother Pete in a dysfunctional home, where "Dad volcanoes" made conflict avoidance an art form. Jason still dislikes conflict in his personal life, but he lives for it in the courtroom. We first meet him in 2009's The Hidden Man, when he defends a man accused of a revenge killing; by then, Jason had already won fame involving a case of high-office political corruption, detailed in Breach of Trust. (Note: Edgar Award-winning author and lawyer Ellis prosecuted and convicted Governor Rod Blagojevich in the sensational 2009 impeachment trial before the Illinois Senate.) Last year, Jason took on the murder defense of a homeless Iraq war vet in The Wrong Man.

Now, in The Last Alibi (August 2013, Putnam), Jason hasn't been himself since blowing out his knee while running earlier in the year. Out of court, his life is a shipwreck. He's beginning to feel like a shill; even if he gets his clients off once, sooner or later, they'll find themselves behind prison bars. Shauna and Joel Lightner, the firm's private eye, say Jason looks like shit and wonder what the heck is wrong with him.

This is the Jason who begins to court the beguiling court reporter, Alexa Himmel. It's also the Jason who eyes an odd-looking new client and doesn't know what to make of him. Recently, two women James Drinker knows have been found, stabbed to death. Drinker says he didn't kill them, but he's afraid he'll be arrested. In fact, Drinker wonders if he's being framed and asks Jason how he'd go about framing somebody. Jason helpfully mentions a few things he'd do. Then he suggests Drinker go to the police before they come to him.

But Drinker doesn't want to go to the police. As more women die in a similar way, Jason begins to suspect that his client is killing them; yet, he can't ethically report his suspicions. Inevitably, Jason comes to wonder just who is framing whom.

You don't need to be a fan of courtroom dramas or legal thrillers to appreciate The Last Alibi, although there's plenty here for such fans to love. For Jason, a trial means war. It's not so much that he loves to win as that he hates to lose. It's a pleasure to learn his insider's view of the courtroom's characters and what he thinks of the prosecution's strategy and witnesses' testimony. While Jason's attorney, Shauna, is conscientious and competent, she's not highly experienced in homicide cases, and Jason often overrules her proposed strategy. Even so, he tells us he wouldn't consider anyone else defending him. The reader only incrementally understands his defense, as Jason and Shauna slowly reveal the legal strategy and what happened before trial.

I really like series regulars Jason and Shauna, who both narrate. I feel I have a handle on what makes them tick, and on the motivations of the other characters, too. Writer Ellis does a superb job of unexpectedly yanking the plot this way and that, and of heightening suspense with the hints Jason drops and Shauna's self-revelations. Inside and outside of the courtroom, The Last Alibi thrills. It's a perfect fall or winter read. Get comfy, because you won't want to put down this diabolical legal thriller before you're finished.

Review of John Lescroart's A Plague of Secrets

A Plague of Secrets by John Lescroart

You've got a tower of books at home, and yet there's nothing you want to read. That was my predicament this weekend. I took a look at www.stopyourekillingme.com and then I was off to the library for a book I'd missed in the Dismas Hardy/Abe Glitsky legal thrillers series by John Lescroart (pronounced "less-kwah").

Lescroart isn't a lawyer. He graduated with a degree in English from Cal Berkeley and worked as a musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. His professional writing career began when he gave a manuscript, Sunburn, to his old high school English teacher. The guy didn't like it but his wife did, and she submitted it to a competition for California writers, where it won first place. Lescroart published a few books while working a variety of day jobs until 1989, when he went surfing, contracted spinal meningitis and lay in a hospital bed for 11 days. After that, he quit his day job and wrote full time. Dead Irish, published in 1989, and 1990's The Vig feature San Francisco lawyer Dismas Hardy. The third book, Hard Evidence, pairs Hardy with his friend, a black Jewish homicide cop named Abe Glitsky. The Ophelia Cut, seventeenth in the series, was published in May.

Dennis Quaid =
Dismas Hardy

Delroy Lindo =
Abe Glitsky

Hardy and Glitsky became friends while they were both young cops. Hardy, whom Lescroart sees as actor Dennis Quaid, left the force for the law. His first marriage ended after the death of his young son, and Hardy lost a decade drinking and tending bar before he sobered up. He and his wife of 23 years, Frannie, have two kids away at college. After working as an assistant district attorney, Hardy switched sides and is the managing partner of a criminal defense law firm. His friend and sometimes foe, Glitsky, is the savvy head of San Francisco's homicide department. He has an "intimidating facial arsenal" of scarred lips, eyes that glow like coals and a prominent hatchet of a nose. He and wife Treya, secretary to the district attorney, have two young children.

Current and former personal and professional relationships of these two men are an integral part of these books and so is the setting of San Francisco, the city that writer Herb Caen called "Baghdad by the Bay." The well-drawn characters live believable lives and readers experience San Francisco's "fruits and nuts," "laissez-faire reality," restaurants and food (for some of Hardy's "black frying pan meals" see Lescroart's recipes here), buildings, neighborhoods, politics and social issues. The fifteenth series book, A Plague of Secrets, is almost like a family reunion for Lescroart fans because it includes characters from previous books, and another series featuring private investigator Wyatt Hunt.

When A Plague of Secrets begins, the Glitskys' three-year-old son Zack has had a bicycle accident and is in an induced coma. His dad blames himself, and his funk goes a long way toward explaining why his homicide underlings, Darrel Bracco and his partner Debra Schiff, aren't as well supervised as usual when they investigate the murder of Dylan Vogler, manager of the popular coffee shop, Bay Beans West. Vogler 's dead body, clasping a backpack full of baggies containing weed, was found at the shop's back door. That, his computerized client list of many well-known San Franciscans, his outrageously high salary and the disrespectful way he treated the woman who owns BBW, Maya Townshend, make Bracco and Schiff suspicious. Townshend is the wife of a prominent real estate developer, sister of a Board of Supervisors member and the niece of the mayor, and the ambitious US attorney smells a career-making case. It's a good thing she hires Dismas Hardy to defend her against civil and criminal charges.

The Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco

Lescroart's issue-driven legal thrillers are intricately plotted and suspenseful. This one is as much a satisfying whodunit as a courtroom drama. The characters' dialog and relationships are both entertaining and realistic. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say how realistic the courtroom scenes are (Lescroart has several lawyer friends read his manuscripts), but I don't really care. These books are a lot of fun and you don't need to wait for when you can't figure out what else to read.

The Goldilocks Principle

You probably remember the fairy tale about Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I recently read in Wikipedia about the original 1837 tale by British poet Robert Southey:

"In Southey's tale, three anthropomorphic male bears – 'a Little, Small, Wee Bear, a Middle-sized Bear, and a Great, Huge Bear' – live together in a house in the woods. Southey describes them as very good-natured, trusting, harmless, tidy, and hospitable. Each bear has his own porridge bowl, chair, and bed. One day they take a walk in the woods while their porridge cools. An old woman (who is described at various points in the story as impudent, bad, foul-mouthed, ugly, dirty and a vagrant deserving of a stint in the House of Correction) discovers the bears' dwelling. She looks through a window, peeps through the keyhole, and lifts the latch. Assured that no one is home, she walks in. The old woman eats the Wee Bear's porridge, then settles into his chair and breaks it. Prowling about, she finds the bear's beds and falls asleep in Wee Bear's bed. The climax of the tale is reached when the bears return. Wee Bear finds the old woman in his bed and cries, 'Somebody has been lying in my bed, – and here she is!' The old woman starts up, jumps from the window, and runs away never to be seen again."

The version of the fairy tale I'm familiar with, and I'd bet you are, too, features a little girl instead of an old woman who visits the house. The little girl, in addition to being very curious, is very fussy and she tests three bowls of porridge, three chairs and three beds before deciding in each case that the Wee Bear's is just right.

The Goldilocks Principle (the condition of being just right) applies to my reading, too. This can create some real problems, trying to find a book that feels like the perfect fit for my mood. A few weeks ago, Georgette suggested using fortune cookie fortunes to find that book and I enjoyed trying that method. Usually, however, I employ the same method Goldilocks used, trying some on for size until I find the right one. Given one situation, here is a book that was just right for me.

I had a draining day at work. After dinner, my two boys backtalked when I told them it was time for homework. I wanted to respond with a little impudence of my own but instead I picked up a book by George V. Higgins, Penance for Jerry Kennedy, and vicariously enjoyed all the adult sass.

Higgins was an assistant U. S. Attorney for Massachusetts and dealt with organized crime. He later worked as a criminal defense lawyer, defending clients such as Eldridge Cleaver and G. Gordon Liddy. As a writer, he is most famous for his books about Boston's lowlife, including The Friends of Eddie Coyle (which I'll tell you about on Saturday), The Digger's Game and Cogan's Trade.

He also wrote a series about a nice guy named Jerry Kennedy, whose criminal-defense practice after 20 years is repetitive. Kennedy says, "Half of what it repeats, from my clients' mouths and mine, can be reduced to those two short words: 'Big money, Mister Kennedy, he promised me big money.' The other half, or roughly that, is people who have created their own troubles with some kind of intoxicants, either because they did not get their big money or because they in fact did.... For me, in my middle age, child molesters and wife-beaters are a welcome change, people who did evil things because of warped passions that did not involve money. And, of course, I meet them all because I'm out for their money."

In the second book of the series, Penance for Jerry Kennedy, Kennedy's client, personal accountant and good friend Lou Schwartz, has been convicted for his income-tax preparation for mobster Nunzio Dinapola. Schwartz refused to cooperate with the prosecutor's scheme to nail Dinapola, so Schwartz was prosecuted instead. Kennedy admits he is not at his best when he puts on a show that he wouldn't believe were he the one watching it and therefore he couldn't convince the jury that Schwartz didn't lie when he signed Dinapola's 1040 form claiming that as the tax preparer, he believed the numbers and sources of income to be true and accurate. (As Schwartz tells Kennedy, "You think Nunzio is going to tell me to put down the barbut games? You think I would ask him where he got the money? You think I would like him to have me killed? Of course it is lies.") Schwartz is going to jail for two years and Kennedy is miserable about it. To add to his unhappiness, the IRS is now turning its attention to him because he's Schwartz's attorney; his wife Mack is arguing with him about money; his secretary is procrastinating; and his mentor, big-shot lawyer Frank McDonald, isn't eager to help him. Kennedy, in his search for a new accountant, falls into the hands of Bertram Magazu, which may not be a good thing.

Higgins's ear for dialogue, ability to create an entertaining courtroom setting and skill at characterization are remarkable. He can define characters in just a line—"David is the sort of guy that you jab every chance that you get, just because he deserves so many more shots than he'll ever get in this world that God would punish you for wasting one." His plots are sometimes filtered through a torrential digression of dialogue and the narrator's internal musings but then one doesn't read Higgins's books for plot alone. If you appreciate a quick-witted, insightful, somewhat world-weary but Mr. Nice Guy narrator, these Jerry Kennedy books are for you. They're not for readers who can't tolerate X-rated talk. For readers who can, they will make you laugh out loud. You don't have to be a legal mysteries fan to enjoy them. I particularly recommend them to people who like Michael Connelly's sleazy lawyer Mickey Haller. Start with the entertaining first book in the series, Kennedy for the Defense.

I'd love to hear about an experience that prompted your attempt to nail down that just-right book. What did you end up reading?