Amazon.com Review
Penzler Pick, May 2000: Lawyers writing crime novels have been a rapidly growing sector of the mystery-writing population for well over a decade now, ever since Scott Turow hit the big time with his excellent
Presumed Innocent in 1987. And then there was that fellow Grisham....
In fact, the legal mystery has been a genre niche for a century and a half: one of the first crime novels ever written, Bleak House by Charles Dickens, chronicled the courtroom battles of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce in 1852-1853. Anna Katharine Green with The Leavenworth Case (1872) and Melville Davisson Post were the first great American practitioners of the legal thriller, soon followed by the Mr. Tutt stories of Arthur Train (an assistant New York district attorney in the 1920s) to the English legal-chambers-set novels of Michael Gilbert, Sarah Caudwell, John Mortimer, et al. The bandwagon has become more crowded on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years.
Fresh voices, however, are always welcome, and with her first series entry, Render Up the Body, Colorado law professor and former federal prosecutor Marianne Wesson achieved what most first-timers only dream of, solid reviews and word-of-mouth momentum that left her admirers waiting to see if she could deliver again. My verdict: she has. A Suggestion of Death takes Wesson's heroine, Cinda Hayes, into a looking-glass world of maverick jurisprudence, where a secret common-law court has set itself up to deal out judgments harking back to a simpler era.
Against all her instincts, Cinda, a Boulder attorney with a knack for attracting the vulnerable and the victimized, finds herself drawn to the charismatic Pike Sayers, who presides over the unsanctioned (and illicit) common-law courtroom. Though he quotes Auden to her, she's not convinced he's any better than the right-wing vigilantes who appear to be his followers. Worse still, she can't decide what role he's assuming in the matter of Mariah McKay, the troubled young daughter of a right-wing politician who is hiding from her family and has sought Cinda's advice on issues of past abuse by her father.
It's a tricky personal and professional obstacle course for Cinda as she attempts to protect both Mariah and herself. A Suggestion of Death has the benefit of the author's own familiarity with the territory. The straightforward legal questions are gripping, but so are the provocative issues raised by common-law adherents. Add the potential for deadly violence, and you've got a first-rate, surprise-streaked suspense novel. --Otto Penzler
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Following the breakout success of Render Up the Body, Wesson returns with another searingly intelligent legal thriller starring Boulder attorney Cinda Hayes. These days, business is sparse for Cinda and her feisty law partner, Tory Meadows, until a whispery-voiced young woman calls Cinda on a radio call-in show. That woman turns out to be the estranged younger daughter of state senatorial candidate Harrison McKay. She accuses her father of abusing her sexually as a child, but she can't quite remember any details. Though reluctant to wade through the legal quagmire of "repressed memory" theory, Cinda finds herself captivated by the lost, anorexic child-woman, who now goes by the name Mariah and lives among suspected neo-Nazis in rural Colorado. Somehow Cinda has to jog Mariah's memory before the statute of limitations runs out; and somehow she has to overcome her own repugnance for Mariah's friends, especially the self-appointed "common law judge," Pike Sayers, whose iconoclastic mystery she finds both fascinating and suspicious. Enigmatic and unnerving, Sayers is a remarkable character, but no more so than the fiercely intelligent but self-deprecating Cinda, who's haunted by the conviction that she's an impostor. Sometimes the plot moves along predictable, overly neat lines. (For example, it's inconceivable that Cinda wouldn't bother to contact the police after someone breaks into her car, then sends her a mutilated Barbie doll with a swastika.) But when it comes to exploring dark, ambiguous terrain--such as paranoid politics and possible incest--Wesson writes with a rare blend of fearlessness, insight and wit. She's now clearly on the short list of the best practitioners of the genre. Agent, Jed Mattes. Author tour. (Feb.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
