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.

Review of Ferdinand von Schirach's The Collini Case

The Collini Case by Ferdinand von Schirach

When I first picked up this book, I was struck by how short it is. I estimated 40,000 words; that would make it a novella under some of the varying definitions of the word.

The Wikipedia entry for the term "novella" also notes that: "For the German writer, a novella is a fictional narrative of indeterminate length––a few pages to hundreds––restricted to a single, suspenseful event, situation, or conflict leading to an unexpected turning point (Wendepunkt), provoking a logical but surprising end." That definition fits this story perfectly.

The book begins with a dry description of the contemporary killing of 85-year-old Hans Meyer in the Brandenburg Suite at Berlin's famed Adlon Hotel. It's no mystery who killed Meyer. Fabrizio Collini, a recently retired worker at Daimler AG's Mercedes-Benz factory in Stuttgart, turns himself in immediately.

Caspar Leinen, a newly-qualified lawyer, is appointed to represent Collini in his murder trial. Only after his appointment does Leinen learn that the murder victim is his first love's grandfather, a man with whom Leinen himself spent many happy hours in his boyhood. Complicating matters further, Collini politely, but determinedly, declines to tell Leinen why he killed Meyer.

Whatever his professional ethical obligations are, Leinen feels morally compelled to do everything he can to find out why Collini killed Meyer. The results of Leinen's investigation play out in the course of the dramatic trial, and not only provide one heck of a Wendepunkt, but also raise complex questions about the nature of justice.

There is nothing sensationalistic about the treatment of the trial's turning point. The description of the trial is engrossing, and notable for the many differences in German criminal procedure from US procedure. The tone of the book is deliberate and detached; the language direct and unadorned.  Somehow, though, that gives it an almost searing effect, and I found myself still thinking about the book several weeks after reading it. Anyone who enjoys legal thrillers should find this an unusual, but satisfying and thought-provoking read.

Ferdinand von Schirach isn't a name well-known in the US, but he has two previous well-received collections of crime short stories, titled Crime and Guilt. The Collini Case, his first novel, was a sensation in Germany when it was published there in 2011.

That last name, von Schirach, might have caught your eye if you're a student of World War II history. Ferdinand is the grandson of Baldur von Schirach, the head of the Hitler Youth organization, who was convicted at Nuremberg of crimes against humanity and served 20 years in Spandau Prison. Ferdinand is a prominent criminal lawyer in Germany.

I can't say more without spoiling the book, but Ferdinand has been open about how his family's past affected his writing of this book. If you would like to read a moving essay by Ferdinand about his Vergangenheitsbewältigung (one of those wonderful German portmanteau words, meaning the process of coming to terms with the past), you can find it here (Part 1) and here (Part 2). However, it would be best that you not read this essay before reading The Collini Case.

The Collini Case will be published in the US on August 1, by Viking.

Note: The publisher provided me with an advance review copy of The Collini Case.