Customer Reviews

Interest of Justice

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If this book succeeds (and, judging by its sales, I guess itdoes), it can only be as "women's fiction." Though toutedas the only best-selling woman author of legal thrillers, Ms. Rosenberg has no feel for courtrooms or for legal issues. As this book opens, the she-ro, a judge, is lamenting having to throw out some evidence in a murder trial on a technicality. The evidence? A confession, the only link between the accused and the crime. The technicality? The police obtained their confession by torturing the accused -- beating him and breaking his arm. Thus, the author, and her judge protagonist, completely miss the point about co-erced confessions. Not only is it inhumane to beat confessions out of people, but there can be no confidence in the validity of any confession so obtained. This misunderstanding of legal issues causes the novel to fail as a legal thriller. For me, it fails as a woman-in-jeopardy novel as well. The judge allows herself to be victimized by almost everybody she comes into contact with, which makes it difficult to sympathize with her. When tradegy strikes, she drives very fast and hyperventilates. I don't read women's fiction. I understand that many of the bodice-ripper romance novels (at least at one time) followed a fairly predictable formula: A woman is raped at the beginning in the story and pursues her rapist through the rest of the book -- not for revenge, but because she has fallen in love with him. The bodice-rippers seem to have a huge following -- and I guess can see this book succeeding with the same audience, though surely with no other.

This is the worst book I have read in years. The heroine is completely unsympathetic, the plot is ludicrous, the dialogue is laughable. As other reviewers have noted, the author plays fast and loose with complicated legal and ethical issues. Even the most uninformed mystery/thriller reader can see that the relationships between the judge, the DA, and the police department are totally implausible. Beyond being a bad book, it is also the worst edited book I can remember reading. Non sequiturs abound, completely contradictory sentences follow within a paragraph of each other, and the plot lurches awkwardly from scene to scene with no transitions. The Dutton editor responsible for this garbage should be fired.

As a judge for nineteen years, I was particularly upset by thecasual manner in which the author treats the judge's ethics.Apparently the heroine gets her relatives out of trouble by using her "clout" and thinks nothing of it. In reality she could be disbarred for her actions. The author exhibits little knowledge of a judges' position in the legal system, and her treatment of a judges' role is an embarassment.

This book (I heard it on tape) is full of implausible situations and characters that behave in unrealistic ways. The author has little knowledge of how judges, lawyers and police behave in real life (if you want intelligent realistic writing about the legal system, read John Grisham) -- and has her characters doing dumb, illogical, annoying things that are just not believable. A disappointment.

I was very disappointed in this book. I thought it was going to be good when I read the first chapter, and after that things went downhill from there.

I didn't like the judge, Lara Sanderstone, her dubious ethics or her stupidity in pursuing the crooks on her own, for God's sake, or her propensity for blaming her fellow judge and her clerk for being pedophiles - one on a dubious request for her to let a felon out on bail and the clerk purely because he was tall, thin and worked for the other judge for awhile. Because Madam Lara didn't know much about him, she immediately jumped to the conclusion that he is guilty.

The author would have the reader believe that Judge Lara didn't know what a sleeze her sister is and still called in favours for her disgusting brother in law when he breaks the law. The woman should have been disbarred.

A book of a very low standard. It was published in 1993 and it's a pity it is still around.