Letter of the Law (Hardcover)

Casey Jordan is a successful Texas criminal defense attorney who likes to take on the kinds of cases that grab headlines and CNN interviews. Her ambition is stoked when she gets an opportunity to represent her former law professor in a capital murder case. Eric Lipton has been accused of the mutilation death of a young law student with whom he was sexually involved. Although the evidence points to his guilt, Casey is confident that she can get him off and certain that he is innocent. It's a promising setup for a legal thriller, but a seemingly unrelated murder in the novel's opening pages will nag at readers. By the time the relationship between the two crimes is teased out, the solution to the first crime seems like an anticlimax.

Lipton is a truly evil man. Casey is not particularly likable either: her hardscrabble background has propelled her into a sterile, loveless marriage to a wealthy man, and her childhood dream of defending indigent clients now seems like a remnant of youthful idealism. The novel's more interesting figures are Donald Sales, the law student's father, a traumatized Vietnam veteran whose grief and rage fuels the narrative, and Bob Bolinger, an Austin cop who believes that Lipton is a serial killer responsible for other, similar crimes across the country. Like Lipton's pathology, which is unveiled long after his guilt is proven to the reader's (if not the jury's) satisfaction, Casey's change of heart--about her client, her husband, and her ideals--is late and lukewarm. Before it occurs, Tim Green has a chance to showcase his heroine's courtroom skills and illustrate why she's among the fastest legal guns in the Lone Star state. A workmanlike addition to a popular genre, Letter of the Law won't keep you up at night, but it's a satisfying hammock read on an Indian summer afternoon. --Jane Adams

Former NFL star and current attorney Green takes his fiction (Double Reverse, etc.) in a new direction with this rough-but-ready read, offering not his first legal thriller but his first novel to be set apart from the gridiron and the pigskin. Green's plotAhotshot female attorney gets accused killer off the hook, then learns he did it and is menaced in turnAfeels as dated and clapped-together as a jalopy, but it runs fast, powered by crude narrative energy and carrying within its rickety frame a host of comfortably familiar characters. When Casey Jordan defends her smarmy former law professor, Eric Lipton, against charges that he slay-mutilated law student Marcia Sales (Lipton was seen fleeing the crime scene), she attacks the case with the same ambition that has swept her from a dusty Texas farm to the pinnacle of Austin legal and fine society; Casey even insinuates in court that the victim's father, Donald, killed his daughter out of jealousy. But seconds before the jury foreman announces, "Not Guilty," Lipton whispers to Casey that he did the deed. Is he joking? Apparently not, as evidence surfaces that he's a crazed serial killer. Character motivation isn't Green's forte: Casey is persuaded that Lipton is evil and that she should help the vengeful Sales p?re (and the cops) track him down only after Sales kidnaps, binds and terrifies her to show her what his daughter went through. Casey's change of heart after such treatment defies credibility, as do the novel's over-the-top climax, which sounds loud echoes of Night of the Hunter, and the killer's persona, which is so cartoonish you expect his dialogue to appear in balloons. Other charactersAparticularly an aging cop and an over-the-hill FBI agentAare handled with more nuance. This novel wilts next to any Grisham or Baldacci, but for brisk airplane entertainment, it'll do fine. Agent, Esther Newberg. 150,000 first printing; major ad/promo; author tour; simultaneous Time Warner Audio. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.