Steelton is a fictional American Midwest town on the shores of Lake Erie, where political battles are to the fore and the proposed construction of a $300m baseball arena is the archetypal background to a Council scuffle. Mayor Tom Krajek trumpets the proposal as the hallmark of a new era of urban renewal; his opponent, Arthur Bright, believes the money could be better spent elsewhere. Sound familiar? Of course it does, as anyone living in a modern urban environment will know. How often are battle lines drawn over the construction of a major public infrastructure? These are the stuff of political ambitions, as prosecutor Bright discovers in his attempt to gain the Mayoral robes, with the help of his protégé, 30-something Stella Marz, the "dark lady" of the title. That's the subversive title she has inherited from defence lawyers, who don't take kindly to her aggressive style and relentless pursuit of convictions. Stella's grabbed onto Arthur's ample coattails, so she has a sincere interest in his political fortunes. Things turn nasty when Tommy Fielding, the project manager of the arena, is found dead with a prostitute. Worse still, they have apparently succumbed to a heroin overdose. Like all good yarns, the circumstances strike a clever cop, Chief Detective Nathaniel Dance, as not altogether kosher. And so the stage is set for more intrigue, particularly when Stella's ex-lover and Bright supporter Jack Novak is also found dead in the most dubious circumstances, castrated and hanging in his cupboard - and he's dressed in a garter belt and stockings. It's of no small significance that Jack was a legal eagle for the Mafia. What's the connection between these murders? Where does the arena construction belong in all of this? Can Stella draw the threads together? Hard-boiled documentary styled legal thriller that is reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett and Phillip Marlowe, the masters of the genre. Patterson likes to connect his thrillers to real events (e.g. controversial appointments to superior courts in "The Final Judgement"; the Presidential campaign trail in "No Safe Place"), and apparently this story mimics some authentic political intrigues that accompanied the construction of baseball stadiums in major American cities. The shenanigans that have taken place around the Sydney 2000 Olympics make any plot involving a major sporting project all too believable. A neat ending, where the loose ends are tied together. The plot device that ties together the Mafia, politics, and big business is a little hackneyed and not altogether unexpected. The Big Clue is all too obvious. The tale is quite grim, so it's not the best choice for an uplifting evening's entertainment. Steelton has more than its fair share of urban evils, including corruption, drug abuse and racial tension. If you're sick and tired of elections, be warned - yes, it's election year in Steelton! Nowadays Richard North Patterson has to be included in an exclusive list of best selling legal thriller writers, along with John Grisham and Scott Turow. Like those luminaries, he too was a practising lawyer, a partner in a San Francisco corporate law firm. He doesn't believe he could have been a writer had it not been for his real life legal experience. He says the skills of a trial lawyer are also the skills of a storyteller - those of us at Law In The Lounge who have court room experience have heard plenty of yarns in our time! Patterson was born in Berkeley, California, in 1947, and graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University and the Case Western Reserve School of Law. He did not start at the top - he was an Ohio assistant attorney general, before going to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Those of you who have read his first novel, "The Lasko Tangent", will recognise the latter experience as the source for much of that story. That book won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best first suspense novel of 1979. He scratched his writing itch at the University of Alabama in the late 1970s, and wrote three more novels whilst working as a lawyer. But then he stopped writing for about 8 years, after which he wrote "Degree of Guilt" in about three months (we're jealous!). Although this novel turns on a controversial major infrastructure project, Patterson himself is not sure whether these types of undertakings are ultimately to the good of cities. On the whole, he doesn't trust either side in these political stoushes - hard to argue with that! This tenth Patterson book earns the moniker "blockbuster" - a pinch of greed, a dash of corruption, a dollop of political machination, duplicity by the truckload and occasional lascivious sex - blend slowly for nearly four hundred pages and you have the recipe for a successful legal thriller. Stella is the centrepiece here, the product of an alcoholic father who has made the most of her limited opportunities ("Stella could remember the stench of mill smoke, the stain left on the white blouse of her school uniform…the evening that the river had exploded in a stunning instant of spontaneous combustion caused by chemical waste and petroleum derivatives…"). Patterson likes to get into the minutiae of his main characters' lives (check out Tony Lord in "Silent Witness"), and we slowly learn much about Stella's psyche and motivations. Like all good thrillers, Stella's private life intersects with the many professional intrigues, lending an air of realism to the plot. Will she be able to unravel the murky origins of the planned arena? Who will be implicated along the way? This is where the novel is at its best, an obstacle course that must be negotiated by an exceptional lawyer whose investigations reveal ever increasing layers of political corruption. Patterson paints a realistic picture of a former boomtown that has come on hard times, the victim of economic rationalisation and the decline of manufacturing industries. The Steelton Blues are the local baseball franchise, which may be foreign to Australians reared on Aussie Rules or Rugby, but the local political scheming will still strike a chord. Like many of his novels, the author here takes pains to look at the seamier side of modern life, and the melancholy that lies at the heart of his characters' artifice. This is not Patterson's best book, certainly not in the league of "Degree of Guilt" or "Silent Witness", but perhaps better than his last outing "No Safe Place". It's still a good read, but Patterson's pedigree suggests he might be a little better than this. Nevertheless, the plot progresses to a satisfying conclusion, and for lovers of legal thrillers this will help wile away those lazy days on the beach. Want us to tell you when we review another book ? Read this: The legal information contained above is intended to be general information about the law. It is not a substitute for legal and other professional advice. Lawscape Communications P/L does not accept responsibility for loss to any person, who either acts or does not act because of this information. |