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This is a review of Signet's paperback reprint of John Lescroart's THE HEARING, which was pubished in hardcover last year by Dutton. The "hearing" of the title refers to a preliminary hearing, which is a part of criminal court proceedings. The preliminary hearing, and the Grand Jury, both are proceedings in which it is determined whether, or not, there is sufficient evidence that a crime has been committed to bind the accused over for trial in criminal court. THE HEARING is a book that belongs both to Dismas Hardy and to his friend, the homicide chief Abraham Glitsky. Dismas Hardy is, of course, the lawyer-hero of all Lescroart's excellent law procedural novels. There have been six prior to this, the seventh; THE OATH, number eight, is now out in hardcover. Hardy wins in court here as usual; but in THE HEARING it's Glitsky who will win your heart. Each of the novels in this series can stand alone. It's not necessary to have read the previous books. But if you haven't been a Lescroart fan before, that's all the more reason to start here. You will then have the extra pleasure of going back and reading the earlier titles -- an enviable experience. Lescroart's usual cast of characters is present in THE HEARING: Hardy's wife, his son and daughter; his grumpy but brilliant colleague David Freeman, and his faithful friend the newspaper reporter Jeff Elliott; Glitsky, as previously mentioned, plus his four sons, plus other police officers, most notably Ridley Banks; the San Francisco DA Sharron Pratt, with whom Dismas has tangled before, and her chief assistant DA Gabriel Torrey. Then there are characters either brand new or seldom mentioned in previous books: Treya Ghent, paralegal assistant to the deceased lawyer Elaine Wager; Cole Burgess, a young drug addict and nephew of the Elliotts, who is accused of murdering Wager; a disreputable but entertaining lawyer named Dash Logan, and his investigator, a total slimeball named Gene Visser. I can't fail to mention the judge whose nickname is The Cadaver -- a minor character but so vividlydrawn that he stayed with me long after I'd closed the book. If all the above seems like a lot of characters, then remember this novel is over 500 pages long. It takes a lot of characters and many layers of plot to construct a novel this big and make it work, especially in such a way that you never have to go back and check to see who is whom. Speaking of plot: Dismas Hardy is called upon by his friends the Elliotts to take care of their errant nephew Cole Burgess, who has been arrested and is in imminent danger of going into heroin withdrawal. (Heroine withdrawal is the most severe type there is, and sometimes is life-threatening.) Cole is nineteen, not quite living on the streets -- and only because his mother sold her house and moved to San Francisco when Dorothy and Jeff Elliott kicked Cole out, for good reason. Hardy, initially convinced the boy's both guilty and a loser, agrees to take his case for long enough to get the young man into treatment or out on bail. The latter doesn't prove possible; the former depends a lot on Cole himself. However, very early on Hardy becomes concerned that justice has been all but precluded in the case because of a stand taken by the DA, Sharon Pratt. Please note that Dismas Hardy is not completely disillusioned, that he is in fact sometimes optimistic, both about the law and about life in general; he also has an amused, tolerant love for the city of San Francisco that is dear to my heart (because I feel precisely that way myself). Just to further muddy the waters in which Cole Burgess is swiftly sinking, Abe Glitsky has made some uncharacteristically bad, emotional calls before and during Cole's interrogation. Later Abe does the same with the police investigation. What's going on? Dismas wonders, and so does the DA. Glitsky is suspended from duty and banished from his office. When he goes to Elaine's memorial service at Grace Cathedral, Abe has a heart attack. Soon Ridley Banks, the police officer who extracted a possibly tainted confession from Cole, and Treya Ghent, the deceased's paralegal, are also having doubts about the way the case against the young addict is shaping up. So Dismas Hardy is caught in a moral dilemma: He doesn't want to take the case, but no one else is going to give the kid a fair shot. Hardy proceeds ... and for a few weeks his life is a terrible mess as a result. But it's an intriguing mess. Hardy's brilliant move is his recognition that the case will be decided not at trial, but during the preliminary hearing. Layer by layer he has built up all sides of his complex investigation, and his argument, until as a reader you too begin to see what he's doing, how difficult, and how necessary it all is, every step of the way. In this book, the more you read the clearer and clearer the case becomes. The plotting is truly masterful. What I like most about John Lescroart is that, more than other of the author-lawyers who all started at about the same time -- Scott Turow, Richard North Patterson, Philip Margolin, and Lisa Scottoline, Perri O'Shaughnessey and Kate Wilhelm on the distaff side [yes, I'm intentionally leaving out John Grisham, because he doesn't write legal procedurals, he writes folk tales in legal form] -- Lescroart has staying power. This is purely my opinion, but as time goes by, Lescroart is proving out this staying power. he gets better, not worse, with time. He simply writes extremely well. He goes his own way with his novels, a quality that has earned my respect totally. Lescroart doesn't make you turn pages at the breakneck speed of most current "thrillers" ... which is why I call his books procedurals, not thrillers, in spite of what the publisher puts on the cover. He is more interested in unfolding the story he wants to tell, in the exact way he wants to tell it, and when you pick up one of his books you can know for certain that you'll be well entertained for as many nights as it takes to read it. Further, Lescroart doesn't make mistakes (with the possible exception of calling his daughter Rebecca, "the Beck", --my one and only personal gripe), not in spelling, not in grammar, not in geography, not in maintaining point of view. I'd be willing to bet that Lescroart's manuscripts are so error-free that his copy editor has nothing to do. The man purely and simply knows how to write. John Lescroart is a rare gem, as he has again proved in THE HEARING.
Reviewed by Ava D. Day, April 2002
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