Last night Steve and I found ourselves in the Mystery / Suspense / Thriller section of a bookstore. My intent was to pick up a copy of American Pastoral, next month’s book club pick. (This should be interesting, by the way. For me Philip Roth’s record is 1 and 1: I loved The Human Stain but could not even finish The Plot Against America. It will be interesting to see my third try turns out.)

Anyway, we were wandering in the Mystery / Suspense / Thriller section and I happened to notice a book called The Second Chair, by John Lescroart. I thought the title was intriguing, and I imagined that perhaps it was a mystery / suspense / thriller book about an orchestra. You know, disgruntled second violinist kills concertmaster in fit of pique. (I wish someone would write that book!) Well I looked at the blurb and the first sentence was: “Although he appears to have reached the top, Dismas Hardy, rainmaker and managing partner of his thriving San Francisco law firm, has lost his faith in the justice system.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve indulged in this genre. I used to read quite a bit of it. In fact the reason we were wandering the section in the first place was because Steve and I had been talking about Frederick Forsyth, whom I used to think was one of the better writers. When I read that sentence in the store last night, it instantly became clear to me that what my life was lacking at the moment was none other than a good hardboiled courtroom thriller full of DAs and cops and witnesses and reporters and corpses and weapons and city politics and whatnot. If some of the main characters happen to be tortured souls drowning their secret sorrows in too much whiskey, so much the better.

I read the book today, all 450 pages of it. Once I started, I really couldn’t stop. But, I’m sorry to say, it wasn’t all that great. Here’s a laundry list:

1. Too much description of people’s looks and why do we need to know everyone’s racial and/or ethnic background?
2. The main defense attorney, okay, she was supposed to be young and inexperienced, but what the heck? The mistakes she made were so stupid I don’t know how she ever passed the bar in the first place, let alone got hired by this firm.
3. The characters with secret sorrows and too much whiskey? Ha ha, I just wish I could resolve my own secret sorrows as neatly and easily as they did theirs.
4. The plot was totally predictable. Every single twist. I guess the main reason I kept reading was because I assumed the obvious solution was too obvious, and that there would be a real surprise twist at the end. There wasn’t.

However… despite the laundry list, it was fun to dip into that world of DAs and cops and witnesses and reporters and corpses and weapons and city politics and whatnot. Despite the clumsy plot twists and unbelievable coincidences, it was pretty readable.

And… I have to confess. I feel particularly forgiving of this writer because it turns out that he’s a fan of Patrick O’Brian! He has to be. Why else would he go to the trouble of telling us that in the detective’s office there is a bookcase with an entire section “devoted to Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring books, Glitsky’s ongoing passion now for the past few years, and the other highly esoteric reference books that accompanied these novels — Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, Harbors and High Seas, A Sea of Words, a biography of Thomas Cochrane, who’d been O’Brian’s inspiration for Jack Aubrey.” Can you believe it? Didn’t I just mention Lobscouse and Spotted Dog and my last post? Oh yes, and a little bit later in the book he has a different character quote Lord Nelson — the famous quote that Capt. Aubrey loves so much: “never mind manoeuvres, go straight at ‘em.” For that alone, this book could have been a lot worse and I still would have loved it.