The Street Lawyer by John Grisham

 

370 Pages

You can buy The Street Lawyer...Here

You can follow John Grisham...Here

This review is by...Owen Powell 

• The Blurb...

Michael Brock is a man in the fast lane.

He's a rising star at Drake & Sweeney, a giant Washington law firm. No time to waste, no time to toss a few coins to beggars. No time for a conscience.

Until the day a man takes several lawyers hostage at his firm, shouting about an eviction. Police snipers shoot the hostage taker dead, but Brock feels compelled to investigate.

What he discovers is a shocking violation of the rights of the homeless on the city streets, with Drake & Sweeney up to its neck in it, and suddenly his conscience begins to stir. But to do the right thing, he might have to steal his own firm's secrets...

• Our Review...

The Street Lawyer is far more than just your typical legal thriller. At it’s core, this is a heartfelt story about poverty, morality and humanity. Following a traumatising encounter within his big, fancy law-firm, lawyer Michael Brock is forced to alter his perspective on… well, everything. As he pursues a mysterious case of improper eviction, Brock immerses himself into the world of D.C’s homeless populace, and witnesses first-hand the tribulations they face every day. Eventually, Brock’s morality outweighs his materialism and he pledges himself to aid the homeless in their abounding legal matters. In doing so, he leaves behind all of the great comforts of his old life - his job, his salary, even his wife! In this new life, Brock is determined to write some of the wrongs conducted by his old firm by helping those in need, instead of once helping those with greed. 

This story starts off strong by throwing the reader right into a nail-biting scene of tension. For these first few pages, I felt compelled to read on, eager to find out the outcome. Unfortunately, this was probably the most exciting part of the story, but we’ll get to that later. The characters in this book are credible and easy to visualise. In my head I cast Bob Odenkirk as the protagonist, for no other reason than he plays a lawyer in the hit series Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. He was perfectly cast in those series as he is in this story too, if I do say so myself. 

However, if I were to pick one flaw within this book, it would be that nothing much exciting happens after those first few pages. This is a very slow-paced, grounded story that strives to be as realistic as it can be. However, I have the attention span of a small child and sometimes I found this book to be a bit of a slog to get through. There are a handful of interesting scenes throughout, but that’s about it, just like real life I suppose. I realise for some people the super realistic nature of these kinds of stories are something they would enjoy, and if that’s you then this is definitely the book for you. Everything else about it was great.

Overall this book does get a  recommendation from me. It’s well-written, heartfelt, thought-provoking and (if you’re into it) extremely realistic. Certainly one of the better books I’ve read so far.

This book is also very well-written, Grisham does not dwell on insignificant details, keeping the literature super simple and engaging to read, which I found to be quite refreshing. All-in-all this is a strong, thought-provoking story that I implore pretty much everyone to read at some point.

• Selected Quotes...

"Like every med student in the country, she had begun her studies vowing that money was not the attraction. She wanted to help humanity. Same for law students. We all lied."

‘We really need able bodies down here. The shelters and soup kitchens are packed, and we don’t have enough volunteers.’

‘I’m not sure I’m qualified.’

‘Can you spread peanut butter on bread?’

‘I think so.’

‘Then you’re qualified.’

"They would soon become my clients, and I would threaten and litigate with a vengeance until they had adequate housing. I couldn’t wait to sue somebody.

• If You Liked This Then You May Like...

Devil's Advocate by Steve Cavanagh (see our review...Here)

The Reckoning by John Grisham (see our review...Here)

Post Mortem by Gary Bell QC (see our review...Here)

• About The Author...

John Grisham is the author of forty-seven consecutive #1 bestsellers, which have been translated into nearly fifty languages. His recent books include The Judge’s List, Sooley, and his third Jake Brigance novel, A Time for Mercy, which is being developed by HBO as a limited series.

Grisham is a two-time winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was honored with the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction.

When he’s not writing, Grisham serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project and of Centurion Ministries, two national organizations dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongfully convicted. Much of his fiction explores deep-seated problems in our criminal justice system.

John lives on a farm in central Virginia.

(from jgrisham.com)

Two Storm Wood by Philip Gray

337 Pages

You can buy Two Storm Wood...Here

You can follow Philip Gray...Here

• The Blurb...

1919. On the desolate battlefields of northern France, the guns of the Great War are silent. Special battalions now face the dangerous task of gathering up the dead for mass burial.

Captain Mackenzie, a survivor of the war, cannot yet bring himself to go home. First he must see that his fallen comrades are recovered and laid to rest. His task is upended when a gruesome discovery is made beneath the ruins of a German strongpoint.

Amy Vanneck's fiancé is one soldier lost amongst many, but she cannot accept that his body may never be found. She heads to France, determined to discover what became of the man she loved.

It soon becomes clear that what Mackenzie has uncovered is a war crime of inhuman savagery. As the dark truth leaches out, both he and Amy are drawn into the hunt for a psychopath, one for whom the atrocity at Two Storm Wood is not an end, but a beginning.

• Our Review...

I chose this book to read after seeing it on Between The Covers on the BBC. It sounded like the cut of my gib, not least because, like most people, I had family that served in the Great War. Most notably at the 1st battle of Ypres, and Cambrai (at which my grandfather was severely injured.) When you have family involved in a setting for a novel it feels more significant and relevant to yourself. I believe the modern phrase is that you "have skin in the game." In addition my favourite autobiography is Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (author of I, Claudius) which deals extensively with the horrors of The Great War.

The most bloody war in history is over and Amy, our protagonist, has gone to the now silent but none-the-less still horrific killing fields of France to find the body of her fiance and bring him home to rest. Amy is riddled with guilt about why Edward (a pacifist) signed up in the first place and that is why she feels compelled to break out of the patriarchal norms of polite society and get so deeply involved in the search. It is only when she enters shattered battlegrounds she realises things are not what they seem and something is wrong, very wrong.

There are two main attributes to this book. The first part is the intriguing mysteries. Who committed the atrocity at Two Storm Wood? (an old dugout in an abandoned trench.) What happened to Amy's fiance Edward? Will she be able to find his body and return it to England so that he may rest in peace?

The second attribute is the other star of the narrative, which is of course the setting. Both are really well done. A twisty plot with characters you want to find out more about. A growing sense of impending doom slowly develops throughout the book. It all adds to an engaging novel.

For me the highlight was the prose that captured the both the physical environment of a post apocalyptic landscape and the prevailing socio-political situations of the era and how they impact on peoples lives (see selected quotes)

Absolute belter of a book. Good to read around around Armistice Day, perhaps in conjunction with our other picks (see below.)

• Selected Quotes...

"They looked Amy up and down as she passed, as if trying to assess her value or her price". 

"Never had the privilege of commanding Captain Haslam– though I understand he was an outstanding officer.’ An outstanding officer. The phrase was a standard ingredient of military condolence. Dead officers were all outstanding. Mediocrity was the preserve of survivors."

"He read out loud: ‘Some have power by right of birth, which is no right, but deference and cowardice make it so. Others buy their way to power...... ‘Few are those whose spirit has been forged by war: chieftains, who gather men to their banners as naturally as the swarm to the hive. In time of war they are feared more than the enemy by those who rule us.’

‘Still, the prospect of life among civilians is almost as daunting. Once war has opened a man’s eyes, he can never close them again, no matter how hard he tries.’

• If You Liked This Then You May Like...

Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves

All Quiet On The Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque ( Click Here for our review.)

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

• About The Author...

Philip studied modern history at Cambridge University, and went on to work as a journalist in Madrid, Rome and Lisbon. He has tutored in crime writing at City University in London and serves as a director at an award-winning documentary film company, specialising in science and history. He lives in London.

Gray, under the pseudonym of Patrick Lynch, is the coauthor of six thrillers that have sold over a million copies worldwide. He published, as Philip Sington, Zoia's Gold, The Einstein Girl, and The Valley of Unknowing.

Philip's grandfather was a captain in the Lancashire Fusiliers and fought through the First World War. Years after his death, Philip came across a trench maps and military documents that his grandfather had kept, and in which he had recorded the events that befell his unit. Based on this information, Philip was inspired to write his thriller Two Storm Wood.

(from bookbrowse.com)

Bloody January by Alan Parks

337 Pages

You Can Buy Bloody January...Here

You Can Follow Alan Parks...Here

• The Blurb...

When a teenage boy shoots a young woman dead in the middle of a busy Glasgow street and then commits suicide, Detective Harry McCoy is sure of one thing. It wasn't a random act of violence.

With his new partner in tow, McCoy uses his underworld network to lead the investigation but soon runs up against a secret society led by Glasgow's wealthiest family, the Dunlops.

McCoy's boss doesn't want him to investigate. The Dunlops seem untouchable. But McCoy has other ideas . . .

In a helter-skelter tale – winding from moneyed elite to hipster music groupies to the brutal gangs of the urban wasteland – Bloody January brings to life the dark underbelly of 1970s Glasgow and introduces a dark and electrifying new voice in Scottish noir.

• My Review...

I selected this book after seeing Alan Parks on the Scottish Bookclub TV show and thinking what a character. Would like to have a few pints with the rough and ready raconteur.

Bloody January is a grim and gritty police thriller set in the urban wastelands of Glasgow in the 1970s. Think of a cross between Get Carter and Tagget. 

The prose is pared down and straight forward as befits both the tale and the background of the unforgiving and unloving city. Hard boiled just doesn't cover it.

The gangsters rob, cheat, steal beat people up, and so do the Police. The only difference is the Police they lie about it. The gangsters and police know each other well and are in a symbiotic relationship. Especially our prostitute visiting, drug taking protagonist Harry McCoy. His best mate is Stevie Collins the biggest wrong un in Glasgow. Is Harry mining Stevie for information or has Stevie got Harry in his pocket?

The writer does a good job of evoking the squalor and toughness of life in early 1970s Glasgow in both the human characters and the character of the city itself.

Then as now, and probably forever, the rich are the most corrupt of all but never seem to suffer any consequences for their actions. Harry rails against this and decides that just this one time that is not going happen. They wont get away with it. He knows he has a huge battle on his hands battling the underworld and his bosses and that's before he can confront the immensely wealthy and powerful Dunlop family.

Enjoyable gritty 70s period police novel.

• Selected Quotes...

He only had two speeds, Murray. Shouting, which meant he was annoyed, and talking quietly, which meant he was about to get annoyed.

bookshops, pubs full of hairy students and lecturers talking about Marxism and the struggle of the working classes. Might have talked more sense if they’d ever met a member of the working classes, but that wasn’t going to happen up here. They couldn’t afford the price of the drink.

The internal walls of the factory had been knocked down, making a room the size of a couple of tennis courts. There were wee fires burning, groups of people round them, couple of dogs wandering about. He heard laughing behind him, turned as a woman emerged from the darkness. She was nude, fat body pale in the flickering light. She was wiping a towel between her legs with one hand, swigging cider from a bottle with the other. She approached the line of elderly men ranged along the back wall, nodded at one and he got up and followed her back into the darkness.

He made a run for it, got in the unmarked Viva and slammed the door. He started the engine up and the radio came on. ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ suddenly filling the steamed- up car. He swore, turned the dial, Rod Stewart, ‘Maggie May’. Much better.

• If You Liked This Then You May Like...

Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin

Laidlaw by William McIlvanney

• About the Author...

First thing I remember is zooming round our concrete back yard on my plastic trike then a bluebottle landed on my arm. Cue hysteria. Things continued much in this vein for a good few years.

I went to The University of Glasgow and studied Moral Philosophy. Unsurprisingly I remember very little of it. After that I was unemployed for a year or so and watched the entire contents of our local video shop. Two films a day for two pounds.

Then I started working in a music management company for a while.I wasn’t very good at it. Then I was asked to go and work at London Records which I did. There I commissioned music videos and artwork and photography. Then London sort of became Warners and I did the same thing there. I worked with some very good artists. New Order. The Streets. All Saints. Enya.

I started writing a book about social housing in post-war Glasgow which somehow became a crime novel set in 1973. That was Bloody January. I put it in a drawer for a while and went off to shoot cast interviews and b-roll on a film called Che directed by Steven Soderberg. I wasn’t very good at that either but it meant I went to Mexico and Spain and Cuba.

When I came back my friend John Niven, now a successful novelist and no longer a partner in crime at London Records, suggested I wrote a novel. I told him I had and I gave him Bloody January. He gave it to his agent who didn’t like it. That was the end of that I thought but he gave it to his friend Sarah Pinborough who liked it and gave it to another agent who also liked it. They suggested I go and see Canongate. I liked them and they liked me so I signed a deal.

Bloody January got published and did quite well so I wrote February’s Son and then Bobby March Will Live Forever. They also got published in various other countries translated into things like Blutiger Januar and Il Figlio Di Febbraio.

I also write things for TV and film, none of which ever seem to get made. So I now spend most of my time thinking up various horrible scenarios in the early seventies. I also walk a lot. That is the story of my life.

(from alanparks.co.uk)