BOOK REVIEW: ‘In the Shadow of the Law’ Has Legal Thriller Elements, But It’s More of a Literary Documentary on Workings of a DC Law Firm
Reviewed By David M. KinchenHuntington News Network Book Critic
Hinton, WV (HNN) – The nation’s one million lawyers must have plenty of time on their hands, writing legal thrillers (John Grisham, Steve Martini, Scott Turow, et al), creating network hits like “Boston Legal,” by lawyer David Kelley, a favorite of mine with the quirky combination of James Spader and William Shatner, and even practicing law. I read somewhere that the U.S.—population about 300 million – has more lawyers than all the other nations put together.
Lawyers can be journalists and writers, but we journalists can’t practice law. So unfair! We can, however, review books by lawyers like Kermit Roosevelt, a great-great-grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, whose “In the Shadow of the Law” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pages, $24) combines elements of a legal thriller in the familiar manner, with what might be called a documentary approach to the workings of a law firm. I also caught more than a whiff of the stately style of two older authors named Louis that I admire: Louis Auchincloss and Louis Begley. Many of Roosevelt’s characters resemble lawyers with the mind-set of Albert Schmidt in Begley’s “About Schmidt.” Not the Jack Nicholson movie version, which just used the title of this 1997 novel, but the novel itself, about a wealthy lawyer in his 60s retired from a Manhattan white-shoe law firm and living in the Hamptons.
Roosevelt, an assistant professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, obviously knows the inside baseball stuff. He has sterling Ivy League credentials: Harvard University, Yale Law, clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter and worked as a lawyer with Mayer, Brown & Platt in Chicago before joining the UPenn Law faculty in 2002. He sounds like a more suitable Supreme Court candidate than Harriet Miers, if Ivy education counts at all to a President who graduated from Yale.
The fictional K Street law firm of Morgan Siler, headed by suitably patrician Peter Morgan, has several cases going on at the same time in Roosevelt’s novel. First year associate Mark Clayton travels to Virginia on a pro bono death penalty case, with the assistance of third-year associate Walker Eliot, who naturally is much more self assured than Clayton. What starts out as a seemingly simple habeas corpus case quickly evolves into the kind of complicated case you’ll find in a Bill Kurtis – also a lawyer/author – “American Justice” program. Virginia would do well to abolish its death penalty, as its breakaway province West Virginia did four decades ago.
Another case involves an explosion in a Texas chemical corporation that kills dozens of workers. Leading the Hubble Chemical defense team is the firm’s top litigator, Harold Fineman, assisted by beautiful (naturally, you can’t have a legal thriller without a striking blonde who’s also a brilliant lawyer) associate Katja Phillips and young Ryan Grady, who seems to be more interested in picking up women than defending Hubble.
Character development rather than plotting is Kermit Roosevelt’s forte, but I found myself intrigued by the – mostly – idealistic and incredibly hard working lawyers of this high-powered law firm. They’re not as weird as the Spader and Shatner characters in “Boston Legal,” but they seem to be struggling with real life situations, including meeting the almost impossible billable hour requirements of high-powered law firms.
Roosevelt isn’t yet up to the Turow level – who is? – but he’s better in this debut novel than many other lawyers-turned-novelists. I definitely felt confident in the author’s knowledge of the inner workings of a top law firm. It’s an excellent, well-researched novel that will leave you smarter about the law than you were before you picked it up.
Publisher’s web site: www.fsgbooks.com