In Dismas Hardy, New York Times bestselling author John Lescroart has created one of the most complex and engaging characters in contemporary fiction. Hardy, the former bartender, loving husband and father, and reluctant defense attorney of Lescroart's blockbuster novel The 13th Juror, returns in The Mercy Rule to face his most challenging case yet.
Set apart from his contemporaries by virtue of his remarkable storytelling, John Lescroart gives readers the novel of his career in The Mercy Rule. Vowing to spend more time with his wife and kids, Dismas Hardy is hesitant to take on the case of Graham Russo, a could-have-been-great baseball player turned lawyer indicted for the murder of his father, Sal. Everyone close to the Russos knew Sal was dying, and that he needed morphine injections to ease his suffering. Graham freely admits to administering those injections, but insists he wasn't there the night of Sal's overdose and resultant death. Was it suicide, murder--or mercy?
With personal and professional tensions mounting, Hardy finds himself face-to-face with a terrifying truth: If this was a murder, he might well be the next person to die.
With his mastery of courtroom drama, and solid connection to the human element that makes his fiction so compelling, John Lescroart has created in The Mercy Rule an intelligent and richly satisfying thriller that will keep readers turning the pages far into the night.
Dismas Hardy, the dart-playing, saloon-keeping lawyer who is one of John Lescroart's most consistently interesting and appealing heroes, faces a dilemma: if he can prove to a jury that Graham Russo helped his father Sal kill himself because the sick old man asked him to, a liberal San Francisco jury will probably vote to acquit Graham of first-degree murder. Hardy would love to plead manslaughter to escape the wrath of the state's attorney general who wants to nail Graham. However, despite the evidence against him, Graham insists he didn't do it. What is a lawyer to do, and who can he believe?
Although Lescroart leads the reader up and down a few blind alleys before the truth comes out, the mystery's not the thing here. It's the characters and their back stories that make this such a good read. Foremost among them is Graham, who washed out of pro baseball and walked out of a promising law career before finding the father who once deserted him long ago. The core of the story is Graham's relationship with Sal, who's losing his mind to Alzheimer's but may still be a threat to a federal judge who was once his closest friend. Then there's Sarah Evans, the homicide cop who falls in love with her suspect. For good measure, there are some changes in the lives of those characters who are familiar to readers from other Dismas Hardy adventures--Abe Glitsky, the half Jewish, half black cop; Drysdale, the D.A. who's been beaten in court by Dismas in previous outings; Frannie, Dismas's wife; Moses, his brother-in-law; and Dismas himself, who becomes more interesting every time Lescroart brings him back. While the pacing is langorous and the denouement not as tight as it might be, The Mercy Rule provides a complex and satisfying reading experience. --Jane Adams
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!
The good thing about a Lescroart mystery is not so much the mystery as the characters who intersect the mystery. Murder's the name but the players are the game. Here Lescroart touches on an emotionally charged issue, euthanasia or mercy killing. There's a nice analogy with the game of baseball, perhaps unintentional, which is that in the early levels of the game the adolescent players learn 'the slaughter rule,' allowing a team which has no chance of winning having fallen behind an insurmountable lead, to exit with some self respect intact.
Hence we have Sal Russo, years ago a bright guy married to his sweetheart, knowing all along she is from a different life, years later preparing to die alone, the target of an agonizing tumor complicated by the onset of alzeimers. He is reunited by his oldest son, Graham, who tried his own (and his father's) dream of playing in the big game, only to fall short. Sal dies under mysterious circumstances with a DNR (do not revive) warning in plain view.
That Graham is arrested, then released, then indicted for murder, reflects the indecision the politicians, their constituents and the police have on this painful topic. Do the terminally ill have control over the time that they cross the river, or do we let events rob them of their remaining dignity?
Dismas Hardy is again the reluctant guardian at the gate, not wanting murder as a crime he defends, all the while knowing it's where his true strength . . . and definition lies.
If there is an irritant, it is the tedious relationship he has with his wife, Frannie. So many alter egos of the novelist's heroes love their partner for what they do, yet make life difficult for them because they do it. Kudos as an aside to Lucy Chenier, Elvis Pike's lover, who got up and left.
But with that one comment, a multi-latered book for the reader who wants social issues, murder most foul, great complicated characters and unexpected twists. Not a fast read but a very good job.
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This review has more to do with the series than specifically with The Mercy Rule. Working my way through the Dismas Hardy novels. Unlike many current detective writers, Lescroart eschews the charismatic psychotic serial killer and his/her elaborate, shocking crimes - burned, hanged, flayed, dismembered, et al. - and offers rather average folks - cops, secretaries, lawyers, etc. - caught up in difficult and unusual circumstances but trying to deal with the challenges of everyday life - work, family, friends.
His characters' reflections on these challenges are simple, poignant, thoughtful evocations of the issues that we all face, and Lescroart does a superb job of coalescing the vapors, giving voice to our ruminations and fears.
His work reminds me of the writing of James Gould Cozzens who won a Pulitzer Prize and was considered for the Nobel Prize. Writing during the middle decades of the 20th century, Cozzens was attacked by critics for being hopelessly out of date. His heroes are quite ordinary men, living quite ordinary lives and find themselves in the midst of a crisis that tests their moral and ethical beliefs. Like Cozzens' characters, Lescroart's heroes stand near us, offering the opportunity to reflect on our own lives.
The plots have the requisite twists and turns and tensions to keep them moving briskly, but it is the thoughts and feelings of the characters that lift these books well above the general run of detective/thriller/mystery novels. The layers build as the series progresses so stay the course and enjoy the books - it's definitely worth it.
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Lescroat has that ability to make his primary characters believeable and earthy. In the "Dismas" books one feels like they are returning to old friends who have encountered some problems along the way. The only problem is that Dismas always seems to get involved in MURDER! And when that happens you can rest assured that Dismas looks under every stone until he finds the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
"The Mercy Rule" was a great 'who dunnit' with quite a few possibilities on the list of suspects but the author holds us in suspense until the enth degree - as we rule out each suspect and turn the pages faster and faster to learn the identity of the true killer.
Even with murder, mystery and mayhem, Lescroat instills a sense of duty, family loyalty and love in his novels and he shows no exception with The Mercy Rule. A great read.
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