Medical thrillers, we all know, are written by Robin Cook; thrillers with horses as the setting, similarly, are written by Dick Francis; spy stories are the ones by John le Carre … and it is Grisham, who with 23 books and 250 million copies, is by far the king of legal thrillers.
Beating that is never going to be easy, but with four books under his belt in as many years, and a fifth on its way, Mark Giminez has a pretty good chance of being the next Grisham—like Grisham, he too has been a lawyer. The Colour of Law, his first book, is set in the zero-diversity manicured world of Dallas, complete with its golf club memberships, flashy cars, cheerleaders and other perks for those who know how to play the game. A Scott Fenney, a young, upcoming lawyer at one of Dallas’s most prestigious law firms, does everything he needs to do to help his clients make more money.
What begins as a routine bit of social work, defending a drug-addicted black prostitute accused of killing a white senator’s son, is pretty much of a no-brainer … of course, Fenney will let her take the rap, she doesn’t belong to the society he’s worked so hard to be a part of. Having a black client gets Fenney thrown out of the conservative clubs he’s a member of, plays havoc with a marriage that never really was meant to be, and the stage is set for a new lawyer with a conscience.
Scott Fenney turns into Atticus (that’s what the A stands for!) Finch, the lawyer appointed to represent a black man in Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-winning To Kill a Mockingbird—like Finch, Atticus Fenney shows, Perry Mason-like, that while the senator’s son was killed by a right-handed person, his client was left-handed. More Perry Mason moments follow, the senator’s aide is trapped into saying he killed the little f***** since that jeopardised the senator’s chances of becoming President and, after getting her off and paying for rehab, the black prostitute dies of an overdose. Her living and marrying Fenney would have made it too much like a Hindi movie.
The Perk is of a similar genre of race, class, justice and the clash between them. A big city lawyer returns to his hometown after 20 years, following his wife’s death and his inability to bring up his children. A small town with the same level of racial tensions and, it turns out, an unsolved murder involving a friend’s daughter—a daughter who, it turns out, would do anything to get an audition to become a star, only to be told that the anything she’d done was her audition. Beck Hardin runs for election to become Judge, tries to sort out racial relations—he’s told that if he rules against a white boy who nearly killed a Mexican, the town’s white autocracy will call in the immigration bureau to deport all Mexicans—and finally manages to come out on top.
Another 18 more to go and you’ll know who the next Grisham is.
THE COLOUR OF LAW
465 pages
Hachette
Rs 295
THE PERK
482 pages
Hachette
Rs 295
