A thundering legal thriller

'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.

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