Series: Abe Glitsky | Publication Date: May 12, 1997
Mark Dooher is the last person anyone would suspect of a savage, bloody murder--the most hate-filled crime one veteran detective had ever come across. But Dooher, a prosperous attorney and prominent Catholic, is the first man San Francisco detective Abe Glitsky suspects. Soon Dooher is standing in the sights of the great, flawed machine called the criminal justice system. And Mark Dooher, a paragon of success and a master of all he touches, is about to be indicted for murder.
As the Dooher trial begins, dozens of lives are drawn into the drama, from the men and women who knew Mark Dooher best to those whose fates are now entwined with his. For Wes Farrell, an attorney struggling with his own sense of failure, the defense of Mark Dooher will mean a chance at self-respect. For beautiful, aspiring attorney Christina Carrera, the case leads to a dangerous liaison with Dooher, who has wanted more than anything to have this woman by his side and in his bed. And for Abe Glitsky, whose wife is dying of cancer, the trial is a nightmare of DNA evidence, shaky witnesses, and long odds: Dooher, the unofficial consigliere of the Archbishop of San Francisco, has the Catholic Church on his side.
As the trial builds to a crescendo, as evidence is sifted and witnesses discredited, as Farrell rises to heights he never knew he could reach and Abe Glitsky grieves, a woman emerges from Mark Dooher's past. Her story will change the role of nearly every player in this trial, and ignite a chain reaction of truth and violence that will alter lives forever.
A novel that surprises from its first page to its last, Guilt is more than a story about crime and punishment. It is a riveting drama of moral responsibility and uncertain justice, of families bound by loyalty and divided by tragedy and betrayal. Building to one of the most nerve-shattering endings in recent fiction, Guilt is a true masterpiece of hard-hitting, contemporary suspense.
Even though the excellent thrillers by John Lescroart--The 13th Juror, A Certain Justice, Dead Irish, and Hard Evidence are out in paperback--usually feature stirring courtroom scenes, where they really shine is out in the real world. His latest is no exception, as Mark Dooher, a high-profile attorney with links to the Catholic hierarchy of San Francisco, is charged with the brutal murder of the wife he had come to hate. Did Dooher do her? Lt. Abe Glitsky, whose own beloved wife is dying of cancer, is sure of it, but defense attorneys Wes Farrell and Christina Carrera--for different but equally hidden reasons--are certain he's being framed. You'll enjoy the tension and appreciate the intricate plotting.
From Library Journal
Mark Dooher has a successful legal career, a long-lasting marriage, charm, good looks, and money; but when he meets young, beautiful law student Christina Carrera, he wants her, too. The author of A Certain Justice (LJ 7/95) has Mark manage, through a series of devious manipulations, to rid Christina of her fiance, get her a job at his firm, and make her fall in love with him. But there is the troublesome matter of his wife, whom he cannot divorce because of his important professional relationship with the city's archbishop. Then his wife turns up conveniently murdered, and the resulting trial could turn out to be Mark's greatest challenge yet. This original, well-crafted page-turner is blockbuster material. Highly recommended. -?Melissa Kuzma Rokicki, NYPL Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
John Lescroart (pronounced "less-kwah") is a big believer in hard work and single-minded dedication, although he'll acknowledge that a little luck never hurts. Now a New York Times bestselling author whose books have been translated into 16 languages in more than 75 countries, John wrote his first novel in college and the second one a year after he graduated from Cal Berkeley in 1970
The only hitch was that he didn't even try to publish either of these books until fourteen years later, when finally, at his wife Lisa's urging, he submitted Son of Holmes to New York publishers--and got two offers, one in hardcover, within six weeks!
But about six years before that first hardcover publication, John's ambition to become a working novelist began to take shape. At that time, as Johnny Capo of Johnny Capo and His Real Good Band, he'd been performing his own songs for several years at clubs and saloons in the San Francisco Bay Area. On his 30th birthday, figuring that if he hadn't made it in music by then, he never would, he retired from the music business.
He'd been writing all along, and didn't stop now, although his emphasis changed from music first, prose second, to the other way around. Within two months of his last musical gig, he finished a novel, Sunburn that drew on his experiences in Spain. Since John didn't know anyone in the publishing world, he sent the manuscript to his old high school English teacher, who was not enthusiastic. Fortunately, the teacher left the pages on his bedside table, and his wife picked them up and read them. She loved the book and submitted it in John's name to The Joseph Henry Jackson Award, given yearly by the San Francisco Foundation for Best Novel by a California author. Much to John's astonishment, SUNBURN beat out 280 other entrants, including Interview With A Vampire, for the prize.
Though Sunburn wasn't to be published for another four years, and then only in paperback, the award changed John's approach to writing. He started to think he might make a living as an author, something he'd never previously believed possible for a "regular guy with no connections." He started paying for his writing habit by working a succession of "day jobs"--everything from a computer programmer with the telephone company, to Ad Director of Guitar Player Magazine, to moving man, house painter, bartender (at the real Little Shamrock bar in San Francisco), legal secretary, fundraising executive, and management consultant writing briefs on coal transportation for the Interstate Commerce Commission!!
John moved to Los Angeles and in the next three years finished three long novels, the last of them featuring a private investigator who shared the name Dismas Hardy (and very little else) with the man who would become John's well-known attorney/hero. Since he'd gotten Sunburn published without using a literary agent (an old friend had shown it to a secretary at Pinnacle Books in Los Angeles, who bought it), John went on submitting his work to New York over the transom, receiving many kind rejection letters, but no offers. Finally he realized that even if he wasn't fated to become a commercially successful author, he wanted to be involved in books and literature. So he enrolled in the Masters Program in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
It was not to be.
While John and his wife, Lisa Sawyer, were preparing that summer to move to New England, he was paying bills by typing technical papers on coal transportation for a consulting firm. Asked by the boss what he thought of the paper, John commented that the argument it made wasn't very compelling and that it wasn't very well-written. His boss challenged him: could he do it any better? In a week, John re-wrote the 400-page draft, which went on to win before the ICC. This led to a "day job" offer that John couldn't refuse. Graduate school fell by the wayside.
But after a year and a half, even a lucrative day job had become a burden. Nothing would do for John by now but to write, but he had little time for writing with his high-paying, career-oriented job. Lisa suggested taking a look at some of the old manuscripts and submitting them--she remembered reading and liking Son of Holmes. How about that one? There was one 14-year-old yellowed and brittle copy of the manuscript left in the world--in the basement of their best man, Don Matheson's, apartment. Six weeks later, John had his first hardcover book deal.
Over the next seven years, back in Los Angeles again, John and Lisa were finally ready to start their family. During this time, John wrote several screenplays and published three more books while he held down a job as a word processing supervisor at a downtown law firm. He rose each day at 5:30 and went to a room they'd built in their garage, where he wrote four pages of his latest in two hours. Then he worked his nine-to-five, ate a bag lunch, and stayed downtown, typing briefs and pleadings at various other law firms until 10:00 or 11:00 at night.
Finally he was publishing, but he wasn't making a living. And then in 1989, at the age of forty-one, he took a break to go body-surfing at Seal Beach. The next day, he lay in a Pasadena hospital. From the contaminated sea water where he'd been surfing, he'd contracted spinal meningitis. Doctors gave him two hours to live.
John now looks back on his 11-day battle with death as the turning point in his career. He quit the last of his day jobs to move back to Northern California and to write full-time, with intense focus and a renewed dedication. The resulting books, richer in terms of theme and story, found a devoted readership and propelled him into the elite circle of bestselling authors--only twenty years to overnight success!
It has been a while since I have been able to sit down and just enjoy some good 'ol legal fiction - nothing heavy, nothing outrageous, just a good story. It was a pleasure to spend long hours reading this book and trying to figure out at first who really was guilty, who really did commit these murders.
The book builds up rather nicely to a somewhat predictable though still suspenseful (can this both be true?) climax that puts the book at a level that often surpasses that of John Grisham types. There is a depth to the characters that makes you root for them and want to keep on reading. I am impressed with Lescroart's ability to present a believable court case - especially since he is not a lawyer.
The actual facts are not entirely believable however. Dooher is so nice, so caring and yet the dark side that eventually comes out is a bit too jolting to seem believable. Perhaps that is the point, to make you think ANYONE could be a murderer. Still, I felt slightly cheated.
This is a good book to curl up with, however, and to want to finish right to the end.
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Maybe I should not have read one of your readers reviews of this book before I read it myself, but I thought it might be good. Some your readers deadpaned the book through the first 300 pages. Most people assume who the killer is, but it is not enntirely certain until the last few chapters. I feel that GUILT is dealing with the loyalty of friendships and the trust broken...even by long time friends. Guilt is an excellent adventure into human relationships and how some people will use those relationships for their own selfishnefss. I love any type of courtroom novels, and there were some good ones here, but it was the mystery and well developed characters that kept me reading and turning the pages. This is one of the best "legal novels" written by a non lawyer. This is a must read for any serious legal, thrill reader!
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Despite good experience with Lescroart in the past, despite the rave reviews on this site and despite the rave reviews on the back cover and a dozen rave reviews inside the front cover, I found myself only caring about what happened to Abe Glitsky. The slow-moving, plodding plotline only reinforced the fact that I did not care what happened to the Mark Dooher. Did he kill his wife? I don't know - it's mentioned in the first sentence in the plot synopsis on the back cover and 200 pages into the book she's still alive and I'm getting irritated at reading about Dooher's connivings to sleep with one of his young employees.
So, anyway, I read exactly 200 pages of this book. It was not easy. I was forcing myself to continue on, much like I would do with a college textbook. Then I came across the new Tony Hillerman book and I gladly dropped this one into the box of books that I'm dropping off at the Goodwill. Thank goodness I am now "Guilt" free!
I give this one a grade of F.
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First Sentence:
MARK DOOHER COULDN'T TAKE HIS EYES OFF THE young woman who had just entered the dining room at Fior d'Italia and was being seated, facing them, at a table ten feet away. Read the first pageKey Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Mark Dooher, Wes Farrell, San Francisco, Victor Trang, Sheila Dooher, Amanda Jenkins, Diane Price, Levon Copes, Paul Thieu, Christina Carrera, Chas Brown, Joe Avery, Abe Glitsky, Lieutenant Glitsky, Sam Duncan, Sergeant Glitsky, Chris Locke, Tania Willows, Michael Ross, Frank Batiste, Sergeant Crandall, Art Drysdale, Lily Martin, Diane Taylor, Emil Balian
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