Degree of Guilt (Christopher Paget, #2) in The Complete Idiots Guide to the Ultimate Reading List

Oct 11, 2011 Lisa (Harmonybites) rated it really liked it

Shelves: suspense, romance, ultimate-reading-list, crime, fiction, novels, contemporary, mystery

I actually haven't read many legal thrillers. The one before this I remember best was Grisham's The Firm and the one I read just before this was Lescroart's Hard Evidence. Patterson has it all over Lescroart, who within a hundred pages showed he knew nothing of the law, completely losing credibility. And credibility is important, whether you're writing about a nuclear submarine or medieval London. Patterson, who worked as a trial attorney and was a liaison to the Watergate special prosecutor, ha I actually haven't read many legal thrillers. The one before this I remember best was Grisham's The Firm and the one I read just before this was Lescroart's Hard Evidence. Patterson has it all over Lescroart, who within a hundred pages showed he knew nothing of the law, completely losing credibility. And credibility is important, whether you're writing about a nuclear submarine or medieval London. Patterson, who worked as a trial attorney and was a liaison to the Watergate special prosecutor, has credibility to burn. As for Grisham. Well, The Firm is about lawyers, Degree of Guilt is more about the law. The Firm immerses you in the seductive lure of a plush rich corporate firm. The law isn't really what it's about. Degree of Guilt is about a murder case--and rape. Not who--we know that from the beginning. But how, why, and what degree of guilt should be assigned Mary Carelli in the killing of Mark Ransom. And in the book the defense lawyer Christopher Paget takes some real risks gaming the legal system that make for a suspenseful page-turning story.

And yes, in some ways it is a trashy book. The kind where every character teases you by reminding you (or being an obvious stand in) for a real life public figure. There's a scandalous tape of Laura Chase (Marilyn Monroe) involving the charismatic Senator Who-Cares-About-Social-Justice James Colt (Jack Kennedy) who died a tragic death. There's the famous starlet turned producer and feminist social activist with a famous father Lindsay Caldwell (Jane Fonda). There's our murder victim Mark Ransom (Norman Mailer), the Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist who is "America's most famous living writer." There's the accused murderer Mary Carelli (Diane Sawyer?) who is a renowned television journalist who interviews the likes of Anwar Sadat and once worked for a Republican administration ridden with scandal. The hero of the novel, Christopher Paget, given he was involved investigating a Watergate-like scandal, seems a stand-in for Patterson himself. This is the trashiest aspect of the book, no question. While the novel is not really a roman a clef, the characters are close enough to real life counterparts for me to feel a bit voyeuristic at times. I was also bothered with how close the characters fell into certain stereotypes. The good characters full of integrity are identifiably liberals; the bad, manipulative "social Darwinist" characters are more than hinted to be Republicans. Also, through Part One--about the first 100 pages--the characters left me cold, cold, cold.

They grew on me though. And one character in particular who started out as despicable did turn out to be more complex that it first appeared, another who appeared cold turn out to have good reasons, and yet another character who I did like from the beginning grew to have more and more of a role. So if you found yourself not liking any of the characters in the first quarter of the book, you might want to hold on a bit longer--things aren't how they first appear.

I also appreciated how the novel handled the matter of rape which figures into the mystery. There are several different rape victims who tell their stories in the book. Unlike in so many cases this comes up in popular fiction, those depictions didn't come across as titillating or exploitative. Maybe because they're told by the victims themselves to another well after what happened, putting some distance between the act and the reader, yet leaving you aching for the person involved. One telling in particular was harrowing to read. And each experience was woven in tightly into the mystery of Mark Ransom's death at the hands of Mary Carelli. Through those experiences Patterson also holds up to scrutiny how we handle cases of rape in America. Not bad for a trashy pop thriller. This is a sequel by the way--there's an earlier Christopher Paget book. But I didn't feel lost because I hadn't read it. ...more

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