This review contains early (minor) plot spoilage, but nothing beyond that which is revealed or alluded to on the book jacket.
Degree Of Guilt is a fiction novel written by Richard North Patterson, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. The book jacket says that Mr. Patterson is a San Francisco trial lawyer and a partner in a firm there (or was, in 1992, at any rate). He studied fiction writing in college and this was his sixth published novel. An earlier novel listed on the jacket, The Lasko Tangent, I guess to be the predecessor to this novel. There is a great deal of mention about a Lasko case fifteen years earlier in Degree of Guilt. Until I read the jacket afterwards, I was not aware this was a sequel. That is meant as a compliment, I find it usually distracts when I read a second or third novel in a sequence before the others. It did not distract me in this case, it reads like a new story with new characters. It does summarize what happened fifteen years before, though, and I don't know that I would enjoy the first novel (Lasko Tangent) as much now that I have read Degree of Guilt.
I purchased this book used in hardback from a charity book sale, for seventy-five cents, new the hardback was listed at $23.00, the softback is available for approximately $6-7. Degree of Guilt was a Book-Of-The-Month Club Main Selection at the time of my book's printing. In hardback, the novel runs 548 pages, a pretty decent sized fiction novel.
The book starts out with a woman (Mary Carelli, mid forties, a beautiful news journalist for a tv show called "Deadline", seemingly an author pun on "Dateline"), moments after she has shot a man in a hotel room. Through the next five hundred pages we unravel the moments before, why she killed this man ("America's eminent novelist, Mark Ransom"). Fighting to keep her out of jail is Christopher Paget (age 45). Christopher and Mary "connected" fifteen years earlier (Lasko Tangent?) and have a son together. The son (Carlo, 15)is not being the only connection for them, the Lasko days stored many skeletons in their closets. Mary has stayed out of Carlo's life once Christopher took custody of Carlo, eight years earlier. But a murder charge is enough for her to call on the best attorney that she knows of, Christopher.
Christopher hasn't represented a defendant in a murder trial in years, but realizes he must protect his son by representing Mary. Not only is Mary Carlo's mother, but Christopher and Mary have secrets from the Lasko trial (fifteen years earlier), that tie and bind and haunt.
Christopher's legal assistant is attorney Terri Peralta (age 29) who has been working at the firm for less than a year.
Main plot: discovering what happened in the hotel room that resulted in Mark Ransom's death while defending Mary against murder charges. Sub-plots involve son Carlo's fifteen years, how he came to be and his relationship with Mary and Christopher as they fight to preserve status quo. Assistant Terri's sub-plot as she not only must fight her own skeletons during the case, but also as she relates to her unemployed husband and young daughter. Also sub-plotted is background on Mark Ransom and a Marilyn Monroe type of Hollywood story that he was researching.
This novel starts out fast and drew me in quickly. The characters are under a dozen, but there are many twists and turns. This made it easy to relate and become attached to the characters. The first half of the book reads very smoothly, the interaction of the characters is wonderful. We come to admire most of them even if grudgingly.
The second half of the novel is heavy on court-room drama. It's better than reading from transcripts, but not much more fun. There are surprises and new situations revealed to keep things from snail pace, though.
Before I checked out the author bio, I knew from reading Degree Of Guilt that Mr. Patterson has a background in law. Only an attorney could spend so much time on the nuances of court-room drama. I also was not surprised that like the main character of Christopher, he lives and practices law in San Francisco. It is easy to see that the character of Christopher is that which the author would wish to be, aside from the skeletons in the past. He is a bit too smooth, too perfect in reaction, too rich and too absent from his home life to be written so lovingly. Perhaps it's my pet peeve, but I find it distracting when attorneys take themselves only made near perfect, and have them star in a book about a criminal case of the decade. The Ego speaks first, and the Ego speaks loudest, and I'd prefer my fiction attorney to be a bit more human. (Insert your favorite lawyer joke here!)
The character of Mary is not made personal. We never really know her much better than we know Barbara Walters or Diane Sawyer. She's a formidable woman, with flaws and strength and wonderful female power, but we never really feel close to her. Insight into into the world of women is brought to us by Terri, who must be modeled after someone that the author actually Knew, in comparison Mary. Terri is pretty believable, although I find her to be a bit too much of a contradiction, part ambitious attorney, part doormat, and she never noticed the disparity? The other female characters involve histories of rape, not easy for a male author to write I would think. This author does well, although I could easily sense they were not written by a woman. But since this type of genre is more popular with middle aged men, that probably isn't going to be noticed by many readers.
There were only a few things written that dated this book as ten years old, but they did stop me in my tracks with a chuckle. One is when Terri talks on a cordless phone for the first time in her life. (Even in '92 they were pretty common, so I found this odd.) The other when they were speaking of politics, and Freud's "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." After the Monica Lewinsky days, what author would say those words without jest?
Overall, I enjoyed this book. The characters that were well developed carried the story along for the rest. The court-room scenes were a bit repetitive, but what do you expect from an attorney author, they were clearly his labor of love pages. There is enough mom and son and Hollywood in this book to keep even non-courtroom-drama lovers reading deep into the night. The only true complaint I have is that I really wanted to find out how it all ended after hundreds of pages of reading, and that's exactly when the pace slowed down to a crawl. Things do keep you guessing along the way, though.
I found this to be similar to some of John Grisham's novels, a combination of court room strategies and personal relationships. It is deeper reading and with less humor in the relationships than Grisham. It is a wonderful view from the defendant's table; if you enjoy Court TV commentary and law fiction you will really enjoy this novel.
Scale of 1-10 (10 is Best), I give this novel:
Overall fiction: 7
Courtroom/law fiction genre: 8.5
Character Development: 7
Dialogue:7
Recommended:
