Customer Reviews

Defending Billy Ryan

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Higgins uses his trademark let-the-dialogue-tell-the-story method to its usual great aplomb. He also allows Jerry Kennedy to reflect more on his life in the law and on his own life in general. Since Higgins is a master storyteller, you will find yourself very drawn to Kennedy's observations, character sketches, accomplishments, challenges and disappointments.

There is hardly any courtroom drama (so stay away, it that is what you want), but there is a good helping in how Kennedy finds an angle to help him fight an impossible case.

The cover reviews have this book right as far as they go, describing the book with terms like authenticity...unmatched", "unerring", "marvellous", "flawless, and "incomparable." John Grisham is quoted as saying about George V. Higgins as being, "The best at writing about lawyers." To be as good s the reviewers maintain, however, Higgins would have to do more that tell us about lawyers and the law, he would have to tell a great story. In this he fails where Grisham always succeeds.

Billy Ryan was on trial for trading information on the proposed location of a highway for the profit of insiders. The legal battle revolved around whether the chief witness for the prosecution accepted a loan from Billy at one point, suggesting (somehow) that a preferential relationship existed between the two. The trouble is, that's not much of a story and the book digresses in endless directions to fill out a thin plot. Unlike a tightly plotted book these digressions are irrelevant. You can skip page after page without missing any action, except there really isn't any action to miss. With all these digressions it makes it difficult for the reader to remember characters and actions that are relevant to the real story.

The upside of the novel is that we find out more than Grisham tells us about the real guts of criminal law. We learn how judgeships are dolled out, how the lawyers exist in feast or famine, how prosecuting attorneys and defence lawyers research and lay traps for each other. Apparently they like to tease each other to pursue lines of questioning and thus open areas of rebuttal where they are more prepared than their opposition. We learn that charges of corruption are almost never plea bargained, because being partly corrupt ruins your career as being totally so.

The information about the law will stick with you, but not the story.