Customer Reviews

The Night Lawyer: A Novel

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Michelle Spring, in her manifestation as author of the Laura Principal series, is one of my favorite mystery writers. I buy her books in hardback, which is how I ended up with The Night Lawyer on my hands. Alas! I spent weeks and weeks looking forward to this book's publication and saved it for my first reading after posting fall semester grades. And I couldn't believe the evidence of my eyes.

Oh, she did not write a chick lit book.

Yes, she did.

The mere absence of Laura Principal from Spring's pages is a reason for sadness, but that could have been a loss from which it would be possible to recover. After all, Ellie Porter might have been as interesting as the protagonists of Laurie R King's stand-alone novels. Spring, however, has changed not just characters, but genres. This is a romance. I kept waiting, waiting, waiting for it to turn into a mystery, but it stayed relentlessly in the pink genre, for all its hot orange dust-jacket.

Our heroine (definitely not a hero) Ellie Porter is tiny and feminine and hopelessly in love with a married man and recovering from a nervous breakdown (after married man dumped her) and victimized by a wicked mother and bossy friends and targeted by a stalker and asked out by every guy she meets and forced to cope with mean girls in the office place. And she cuts herself.

Please. This is a Lifetime movie.

Ellie has a pet, a hamster named Odysseus, cute and little. Even as I read about this adorable rodent, I know it is doomed to some generically gruesome end. Sadly, the hamster is appropriate in a pathetic way. Ellie is just not up to keeping a real pet -- too self-absorbed.

The breath-stopping suspense of the Laura Principal books is here morphed into low dread besieging poor little Ellie, she who is "tiny, but perfectly made," she of the cloud of hair and dusting of teeny freckles. Yes, she knows karate, but she doesn't like all that aggressive sparring they have to do, and -- although she's just so darned cute in her white pajamas -- neither she nor we feel her expertise could save her from all the mean men whose interest threatens her. (OK, she does have sex with a karate guy, but if you blink, you'll miss it.) Any elements of independence or self-confidence in Ellie seem to be there by mistake, leaching through from Spring's real hero, Laura. Even the archetypal transformation of the last 10 pages fails to rehabilitate Ellie's poor petite persona. And hearing her chant "all grown up now" at age 30 is deeply annoying.

For reasons passing my understanding, Spring chooses to narrate this in the present tense. Ellie comes and goes (fully half the novel is filled with her trips back and forth across the Isle of Dogs) and works and works out and sighs and cries all in the present tense. Is this a convention of the romance novel? It makes for very awkward reading: that which has happened, that which will happen, and that which is happening all inhabit the same temporal plain. If this device is intended to show us that Ellie is trapped in her own past, it's unnecessary. The endless iterations of her childhood fears more than accomplish that.

And then the syntax there is. "A chilly December day his birthday was, with a low gray ceiling of cloud, and Carl was in the back garden setting up a laundry line." What's up with that? No, it's not limited to narration about that one character, but pops up here and there and here, seemingly to no purpose. I keep expecting a red wheelbarrow and white chickens.

If you're looking for a murder mystery, keep looking. Try Laurie King or Deborah Crombie or the early Tanenbaum novels ghosted by Michael Gruber. Try Spring's Laura Principal books. Try for real women, not a cute and quivering victim.

Michelle Spring deserves her reputation as a topnotch writer of psychological suspense (In the Midnight Hour, Nights in White Satin.) She goes full throttle again to deliver chills and nail biting tension with The Night Lawyer.

Ellie Porter is a young woman struggling to put her life back in order following a nervous breakdown. Abandonment by her married lover was the major cause of her illness, although she is also haunted by the murder of her father some twenty years ago. Slightly built she is blessed with long, curly reddish gold hair, and an eye catching figure. ""Though Ellie's scarcely aware of it, heads turn and grown men weaken when she shrugs off a shawl to reveal a well-cut black dress and a decolletage to die for."

She's pays scant attention to her assets as she concentrates on regaining mental health. Her mother, Anabel, is of little help, rather the opposite constantly harping on Ellie's weight gain, nagging that she'll never attract another man. That's the last thing Ellie wants. She turns to karate to boost her self-confidence, and in order to practice during the day she takes a night job.

This is not just any job, she's a night lawyer with London's Chronicle newspaper. She's the one responsible for catching anything that might be cause for legal action against the paper. Ellie's the Chronicle's only night lawyer, and she works alone.

She seems well on the road to recovery when her tranquility at home is interrupted by sounds coming through the wall from next door. It is Jessica, a young neighbor with a bent for self-mutilation, and Jessica's boyfriend, Tull, who has an aversion to honest labor. Almost against her will we see soft-hearted Ellie becoming involved in the young woman's troubled life.

That is but one drama that intrudes upon her world - Ellie believes she is being watched, stalked, and she is. Someone follows her in the dark of night when she leaves work. Who and why?

British author Spring richly evokes London, the Isle of Dogs, the Docklands. Her setting is described not only with telling detail but with affection. For this reader Ellie's character was not presented as clearly, yet suspense is well crafted as it moves, albeit slowly, to a startling finish.

- Gail Cooke

This book had be hooked within the 1st couple of chapters. I lost much sleep trying to finish this book as I couldn't wait to find out what would happen next. The main character was well rounded and easy to imagine. This book was a wonderful read.

Lawyer Ellie Porter honestly thought her married lover was going to dump his wife to be with her. However, his wife got pregnant and he broke it off with her causing her to have a nervous breakdown. She commits herself into a psychiatric hospital and when she comes out she has to start over in her career. The only job she can get is THE NIGHT LAWYER for a tabloid paper the Chronicle making sure the stories reporters write aren't libelous.

Carl Hewitt who notices Ellie getting out of the lift starts watching her because she is like a breath of fresh air in the polluted political arena. Jonathan, a colleague from work, befriends her and an unknown co-worker Tristan Blacombe compliments her on her work. However, her personal life is in turmoil as she feels someone is stalking her. Ellie also has a threatening letter delivered to her and has a peeping tom watching her from behind some bushes on her lawn when she is semi-naked. Most frightening of all someone broke into her house and she was never aware of it. If she doesn't get some answers soon, she will have another nervous breakdown.

Michelle Spring has written an extraordinary work of psychological suspense with a gothic foreboding atmosphere that sends a chill down the spines of the reader. The protagonist is trying to stay calm in the face of adversity but as she feels increasingly threatened, she is determined to find out who is doing this to her and why. THE NIGHT LAWYER will be appreciated by those readers who like the works of Joy Fielding and Jody Picoult.

Harriet Klausner

Review of The Night Lawyer, by Michelle Spring

Random House, 2006

Rarely does a novel do so much to capture the visceral as well as the
visual energy of both a place and state of being, than does Michelle
Spring's new novel, The Night Lawyer. The book offers up an experience
of East London and its towering financial centre at Canary Wharf,
imposed against a night snapshot of a city in a moment in time: in stark
contrast to the last few remaining rows of Victorian workers cottages,
abandoned shipyards and dock warehouses of the Isle of Dogs. It
describes the social and architectural discrepancies of rich and poor,
stainless steel and old wood, imported marble and muddy footpaths, all
bound together by the energy of the people who live in the Thames
Gateway, and who travel in and out via the DLR (Docklands Light
Railway), which connects this urban but remote eastern waterway area to
the city of London, and the world beyond.

The language of the novel is at once sparse and elegant- evoking the
simplicity and stunning chiaroscuro of a skyline at night, where the
unseen facets of cranes, towers, and plumes of smoke fuse above and put
into perspective the toiling of people on the ground.

Yet all this, rich as it is, is merely the backdrop for the story of a
remarkable young woman: Eleanor Porter, the night lawyer hired to do
the lonely late night shift at a tabloid newspaper- a dangerous job in
more ways than one, but the right job to test the mettle of a woman
newly returned to work and life after a serious breakdown.

Like the Docklands of the novel's setting, the main character is
herself a set of contradictions that flow into a solid whole. Eleanor,
or Ellie, is petite, but strong. She twirls like a dancer but also
kicks with the best in her karate club. She has learned how to live
alone, how to keep her space simple and clean, without the clutter of
domestic objects, but with easy to follow walls and boundaries. She
lives alone but has an empathy for others that takes her, against her
will and better judgment, out by foot through the winding streets and
canals and between the wealth of her office tower and the mixed economy
of her new neighborhood. She stands up to the hooded youths who hang
around menacing along her street, and traverses the great divide of her
own safe garden wall to help the young neighbor girl whose boyfriend
contributes to both women's senses of uncertainty in a hard world.

The Night Lawyer is the story of a woman who comes to terms with the
process of being stalked, and who does so alone. The police do not
help, the neighbors do not help, the office colleagues who try to help
fail to understand the magnitude of the problem. Ellie helps herself.
Her story is one of the transformative female experience of emerging
from victimhood to survivor. Her is also the story of emancipation from
the burden of deep memory of abuse, unearthed by the stirrings of a
photograph, brought to her attention by a shadowy figure encountered
too close to home.

What is striking about Ellie, and the novel as a whole, is the energy
that the story drives ahead. Eleanor is edgy: she makes some bad
choices as well as some good ones, acts uncertainly and unstably when
faced with unexpected danger, and finds it difficult to trust the
social systems that are meant to protect her. This makes her a
realistic character for our modern age, when social systems are
breaking down and the edges of the 'urban regeneration' areas express an
uncanny mixture of possibility and the end of certainty.

Without wishing to give the story away, I would simply say that readers
of many ages, women and men alike, will find in this book an accurate,
energised and uneasy description of an urban area in the process of
change, and of a woman who learns to live within that process of change.

This story is ripe for dramatisation, either in film or perhaps in TV
serialisation, for surely there are many more stories cases to be
solved and resolved by this night lawyer, in a world that 'never
sleeps'. This reader is very much looking forward to Ellie Porter's
next encounter. . .