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DADDY'S GIRL
by Lisa Scottoline
Macmillan, September 2007
400 pages
12.99 GBP
ISBN: 1405089474


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

DADDY'S GIRL, Lisa Scottoline's 14th novel, sets out to be different. Of course, it can't be different in every way – her protagonist is a young American of Italian extraction, but she is not a practising lawyer.

Natalie Greco is a lecturer (an untenured one) at Penn Law. She is desperate to obtain tenure but has to contend with a class of students who are less than interested in the distinction between law and justice in Shakespeare's play, THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. While organising them into characters to read the play, Nat (nicknamed 'Gnat' -- a nickname with which she is, inexplicably, quite happy) comes in contact with colleague Angus Holt, a man whose lectures are extremely popular with his students. Angus is able to persuade Natalie to accompany him to the local prison where he lectures the inmates; he feels Natalie's lectures would be well received there.

Nat has some misgivings about the visit, misgivings that are shown to have a good basis in reality when there is a riot at the prison. She is rescued from the over-amorous attentions of one particularly loathsome prisoner but encounters a guard (or 'CO') who is dying from a stab wound. She attempts, unsuccessfully, to resuscitate him but, failing, hears his dying wish, that she take a message to his wife and tell her that "it's . . . under the floor."

The lecturer is determined to fulfil the dying man's wishes but along the way finds herself on the run from the law, a suspect in a murder and also suspected of deliberately wounding the guard's widow.

Suddenly, from being the downtrodden, negligible creature, seen as far less important than her brothers, even by her boyfriend, she must rely on her wits to escape the law and exonerate herself. Along the way, she discovers a formerly unknown 'station' along the Underground Railroad, the route by which escaped slaves were rescued and sent to safe houses and new lives in the free states. To my mind, the section dealing with the history of the road to emancipation of slaves provides the most interesting aspect of the book.

If you enjoy Scottoline's work in general, this book that depicts the transformation of a mouse into, well, not a lion, but a self-sufficient woman capable of acting on her own principles, will also appeal. I can't claim it is a masterpiece of deep thought and characterisation but it is certainly a pleasant, entertaining novel.

Reviewed by Denise Pickles, September 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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