Having just
published A QUESTION OF PROOF, a legal thriller with twists and turns not
resolved until the very last sentence, I’ve had some experience with the
genre. And being a lawyer by training, I
probably have a leg up on legal intricacies.
But I would suggest that the legal thriller is only effective if it is a
story about the people involved, with the legal system, say a murder trial,
being the inexorable peril they confronting them. Peril is the essential ingredient for any
thriller, and an all-powerful legal system is a fearsome form of peril with
some form of loss at stake for the defendant and, at its most intriguing, those
around the defendant. The threat can run
from the loss of something the defendant holds dear to, at its most fearsome,
death by a jury’s decree.
In A QUESTION OF PROOF, Susan
Boelter is charged with murdering her newspaper-publisher husband, who was
divorcing her and appeared to be on the brink of taking everything from her,
including custody of their thirteen-year-old daughter. She asks Dan Lazar, a renowned criminal
defense attorney, to defend her. But he
faces two obstacles to taking on her defense: He is about to lose his license
to practice law due to trumped-up charges of witness tampering; and, more
important, he and Susan are lovers. The
legal system has provided the hurdles and dangers, but they are only the means
for exploring the acts, motives and relationships of the people trapped within
it. I say the story remains unresolved
until the very last sentence, but that sentence relates to Susan and Dan and
their relationship, not to a legal outcome.
If readers care about their story, they will be engrossed in discovering their
fate until the very last word.
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