Tangled Web UK Review March 2003
The Arraignment by
Steve Martini
hbk out January 03
Published by Headline
at £17.99
There must be more crime-writers in California than hot dinners, as this is
yet another novel set in that state, this time in sunny San Diego.
It is also yet another tale of attorneys, understandable enough in a country
which has more lawyers than the rest of the world put together and the first
part reads like a John Grisham. The jacket describes it as 'a new courtroom
thriller', but in fact it contains not a single courtroom sequence. The first two
thirds is conventional investigative to-ing and fro-ing, but suddenly it
changes pace and become a gun-toting adventure in Mexico, with plenty of
blood and corpses.
The Arraignment concerns a lawyer, Paul Madriani, who sees his friend
Nick, another attorney, gunned down in the street alongside a man who Paul
turned down as client because of his dubious background. Because of a
niggling guilt that maybe he was the intended victim, Paul sets out to
investigate the killing and becomes involved in a big insurance dispute
between Nick's divorced wife and his current new dolly-bird bride. A
Mexican connection soon appears, assumed to be drug-related and Paul
becomes deeply enmeshed with the head of the large law firm for whom
Nick had worked. Complication follows complication until urban San Diego
is exchanged for armed excursions through the Yucatan jungle.
Well-written and a good read, the plot is complex and tortuous, requiring
many pages of terminal explanation to pull all the threads together. The
author is, not unnaturally, a lawyer, with a good track-record of previous
novels of the same ilk.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
New Books by Steve Martini at Amazon.co.uk
Secondhand and Out of Print Books by Steve Martini at Alibris.com
