‘The Jury Master’
by Robert Dugoni
Warner, 438 pp., $24.95
John Grisham, move over. With his debut courtroom thriller, “The Jury Master,” Seattle author Robert Dugoni explodes from the tired pack of Grisham wannabes with a riveting tale of murder, treachery and skullduggery at the highest levels.
David Sloane is an extraordinary San Francisco trial lawyer, with an unbroken string of courtroom victories that astonishes even Sloane himself, as he gets even obviously guilty clients acquitted against all odds. Tormented by recurring nightmares, however, Sloane is plainly troubled emotionally. His life is turned upside down when his home is ransacked.
More than 3,000 miles away, Tom Molina, a West Virginia police detective, investigates what appears at first to be a relatively obvious suicide in a national park. But things get more complicated when a high-handed assistant United States attorney reveals that the dead man is Joe Branick, a close friend of Robert Peak, the U.S. president, and demands control over the investigation. Suspecting something more sinister than a suicide, Molina refuses and soon learns that his suspicions are well-founded.
These seemingly unconnected events coalesce when Sloane, reading the headlines, realizes that Branick had attempted to contact him in the last few hours of his life and had mailed him a package. Sloane’s realization that the package and the break-in may be connected is underscored as events hurtle forward with the brutal murder of Sloane’s elderly neighbor, leaving Sloane, a former Marine, stunned and on the run.
The president, meanwhile, is dealing with plummeting approval ratings, the apparent suicide of his friend and an emerging oil deal with Mexico to help secure greater independence from Middle Eastern oil – as well as a related threat on his life from underground guerilla groups in Mexico.
Of course, nothing is as simple as it seems. Innocent people die, trained military operatives take on both Molina and Sloane, and a 30-year-old conspiracy all converge at breakneck speed. The tale sweeps to a dramatic conclusion in the same national park where it all started, where Sloane learns the reasons for his recurring nightmares, the president’s fears are realized and justice is, ultimately, served.
It’s a great story that fairly thunders along from start to finish, and a terrific debut. Dugoni, a Seattle lawyer who retired from the practice of law in 1999 to concentrate on his writing, has previously published “The Cyanide Canary,” a nonfiction account of an environmental litigation similar to Jonathan Harr’s “A Civil Action.”
Of course, saying that this potboiler rivals Grisham is a rather vicious case of damning with faint praise. Like Grisham, Dugoni doesn’t even try to comment on larger issues, and the political context woven into the background is both laughably simplistic and curiously out of date. A Marxist guerrilla group is involved; when was the last time a Marxist guerrilla group served as anything but the punch line of a joke or a historical footnote? Dugoni, moreover, cuts back and forth from scene to scene, almost as if written for a particularly disjointed episode of the popular television show “24.” Then, again, with royalties for syndication rights being what they are, perhaps that’s precisely what Dugoni intended.
But, in all fairness, this is a debut novel and Grisham’s first one was no award winner, either. Dugoni has a flair for developing an engaging plot, with memorable characters, and keeping things moving like an overcaffeinated barista. For an opening salvo, it’s hard to ask for more.
Year: 2006
-
A thundering legal thriller
-
French writer doesn’t live up to his own hype
Traveling in the Footsteps of Tocqueville
Random House; translated by Charlotte Mendel
308 pp., $24.95
As the self-proclaimed greatest living French philosopher and “prophet,” and with the chutzpah to compare himself to Alexis de Tocqueville, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jack Kerouac, Bernard-Henri Lévy has a lot to live up to. Instead of doing so, in “American Vertigo: Traveling in the Footsteps of Tocqueville,” (Random House, 308 pp., $24.95, translated by Charlotte Mendel), he presents a textbook demonstration of the adage that those who boast the loudest most often have the least to boast about.
Lévy, a prolific French author-activist, spends his time courting the press, pursuing various causes and relaxing by the pool at his Marrakech palace with his movie-star wife, Arielle Dombasle. The author of some 30 books, Lévy is breathlessly described by his publisher as no less than “France’s leading writer” and by Vanity Fair magazine in a recent profile as a “superman and prophet: We have no equivalent in the United States.”
Excuse me? If this is “France’s leading writer,” then that’s a sad statement indeed for the state of the French Academy.
Lévy was commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly magazine to travel the United States, in an effort to duplicate Alexis de Tocqueville’s own journey, made famous by his 1831 book, “Democracy in America.” De Tocqueville’s thoughtful observations about America and the American democratic experiment are among the most influential political analyses ever written on the subject. The book, in print for more than 150 years, is a classic of political literature and few, if any, foreign writers have ever come close to de Tocqueville’s trenchant observations.
The suggestion that Lévy, the playboy gadfly of the French intellectual set, could “follow in his footsteps” is a dubious concept from the outset, and the actual product proves even worse.
Lévy’s overblown style combines ceaseless name-dropping, merciless redundancy and horrific verbosity in one toxic combination. An editor could have easily reduced this entire volume by some 75 percent without losing a single important thought. Lévy manages, in the introduction, to launch sentences that ramble through villages, streams and forests without punctuation, pause, or even the suggestion of a period for nearly a full page. Whew. Is this mash-up of thoughts supposed to impress the reader or simply beat him or her into submission?
Worse, Lévy has the gall to compare himself, at the outset, with both de Tocqueville and Jack Kerouac. He would have profited mightily by setting his sights just a bit lower. Lévy set out to follow de Tocqueville’s travels and, with a handful of exceptions, followed his path. He devotes short chapters to describing what he found. From the monstrosity of Mount Rushmore to the foggy city of San Francisco, Lévy catalogs a variety of American sights, cities and movements. He devotes an adoring chapter to Seattle, in which he declares that he “loved absolutely everything about Seattle” (although he uncharacteristically manages to convey his thoughts on the subject a pithy three pages). But for all the arm-waving, the author provides precious little political analysis or thoughtful observation about his travels, America after the turn of the millennium, or its status as the world’s only superpower on a lonely nation-building mission to remake the world (or at least parts of it). The book reads more like a compendium of jumbo postcards written by a pompous European observer with a short attention span and an apparently straying intellectual curiosity. Surely, we can do better than this. France arguably laid the very foundation of American democracy — funding the revolution when there were precious few others willing to underwrite such a ragtag collection of rebels; contributing some of the most potent strands of political theory embraced by the revolutionaries; and, half a century later, contributing an astonishingly thoughtful observer, in de Tocqueville, to catalog the American experiment as it unfolded. Unfortunately, however, Lévy’s return engagement fails to provide any fresh insight. Instead, it serves as a rather dramatic reminder (at least for those intrepid enough actually to finish the book) that the value of an idea or an observation is far more often measured by its perceptivity or originality, rather than the lifestyle of its author or the sheer volume of ink used in its printing.