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FIRST DEGREE
by David Rosenfelt
Mysterious Press, May 2003
231 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0892967544


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Andy Carpenter, David Rosenfelt's wise-cracking lawyer who first appeared in Open and Shut, is back in another complicated, clever, and funny legal thriller.  At the end of the last novel, Andy discovered that he was rich beyond  his wildest dreams.  As we all know, money doesn't buy happiness, and Andy finds that wealth has taken the edge off his professional ambition (to the degree he ever had any).  Thus he is suffering from lawyer's block, as he says, unwilling to take on cases he finds uninteresting and spending his days petting Tara, the wonder Golden Retriever he saved from death row and watching his secretary do the Times crossword.

He is pried from his gentle semi-retirement by the murder of a thoroughly unpleasant and wholly corrupt  policeman, Alex Dorsey.  Dorsey loathed Laurie Collins, ex-policewoman and current private investigator, the woman Carpenter loves, who blew the whistle on him. Several years ago, he forced her out of the Paterson police department and destroyed her career.  This circumstance, and a mountain of convenient evidence, is enough to get her indicted for decapitating Dorsey, and Andy finds himself more than interested in the case--his whole life depends on his winning it.

Second novels are often something of a let-down after successful debuts, but readers who enjoyed Andy's smart mouth, his courtroom behaviour, and his dog Tara will not be disappointed.  The plot is, if anything, even more twisty than  in Open and Shut, the pace swifter and the tension tighter. But once again, it is Andy, the most likeable smart-alec lawyer in fiction, who carries the book.  We have long suspected there is something in the New Jersey water (no, not what you think), but whatever it is, is seems to breed funny and engaging crime novelists.   

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, July 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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