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KILL ALL THE JUDGES
by William Deverell
McClelland & Stewart, April 2008
424 pages
$34.99 CDN
ISBN: 0771027214


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

No matter how firmly or how often Arthur Beauchamp announces that he has retired, no one seems to be listening. He has his goats, his farm on Garibaldi Island, his wood-chopping and rustic chores to occupy his time. He does not want to voyage over to Vancouver and don his robe and his dickey to defend anyone, least of all Cudworth Brown, poet and accused murderer of Justice Whynet-Moir. Brown did, after all spend an unconscionable amount of time up a tree with Arthur's wife a couple of years ago, protesting clear-cut logging.

So he recommends a prominent attorney, Brian Pomeroy, to handle thedefence. Sadly, Beauchamp has not heard that a perfect storm ofdisasters - a failed marriage, financial woes, and a serious coke habit- have, to put it kindly, undermined Pomeroy's mental stability to the point that he couldn't defend a kitten against the animal control officer. Pomeroy runs for his life down the courthouse steps, gown flapping in the breeze, and retreats into a drug-induced paranoia in a

very comfortable rehab facility, leaving his client, poor Cudworth, defenceless. He takes with him the book he is working on, a crime novel that details, with some relish, the serial murders of most of the prominent judges on the British Columbia bench.

The somewhat dotty but decidedly loyal population of Garibaldi pressure Arthur to spring to Cudworth's aid. Assuming that Arthur's reluctance is not professional, but founded in the suspicion that the poet and Margaret, Arthur's wife, were up to something less high-minded than anti-logging protests in that tree - they manage to shame Arthur into heading off to Vancouver to don his trademark braces and triumph in the courtroom once again. Left at home, Margaret is running for the Green Party in a federal by-election, one that Arthur fervently, if privately, hopes she will lose.

It is hardly surprising that Arthur is not quite at the top of his game, much to the disappointment of his hero-worshipping junior, someone remarkably unsure of himself for a lawyer. It falls to him to do much of the leg-work necessary to untangle what turns out to be a complicated plot involving more than one juridical murder.

William Deverell is on record as being opposed to series characters, but happily, he seems to be willing to break his rule as often as Arthur Beauchamp can be coaxed out of retirement. Arthur first appeared in 1997, in TRIAL OF PASSION and returned in 2005 in APRIL FOOL, which earned its author his second Arthur Ellis award for best novel. And now the charming, somewhat bumbling, often self-doubting, but always humane attorney is back, with his scraps of poetry and his sometimes inaccurate Latin tags and I, for one, am delighted to see him and hope he can soon be pried from his goats to cheer us once again.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, March 2008

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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