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D. W. Buffa gained his doctorate in Political Theory and his knowledge of his subject is very evident in this latest work but he was employed for ten years as a defence attorney. Before graduating to fiction, Buffa, together with Morley Winograd, co-wrote Taking Control : Politics in the Information Age, a book discussing the effect of technology on law and politics. Subsequently, his forays into the mystery genre, The Defence, The Prosecution and The Judgment featured lawyer Joseph Antonelli as the chief protagonist in thoughtful, reflective novels with a heavy emphasis on characterisation and a minimum of courtroom fireworks. Joseph Antonelli, in this book, is recruited by his cousin Bobby to defend a young black man accused of the opportunistic slaying of a United States Senator, Jeremy Fullerton, a very unappealing character. Bobby has done his recruiting at the behest of his friend and partner, the flamboyant but aging Albert Craven. Craven gives as his reason for his interest in the fate of the young man, Jamaal Washington, a friendship with a former employee who is the mother of the boy. Antonelli, after meeting Washington, a premed student, needs no convincing of the youth's innocence and sets out to do his best to prove the accused is blameless. Other deaths seem to be tied to that of the senator and Antonelli is drawn, reluctantly, into a web of intrigue dating back decades, in which nothing is as it seems. The lawyer finds himself introduced to the rich and powerful of Californian politics including millionaires and would-be governors and Presidents. He also makes the acquaintance of an oddly compelling former Soviet Union spy. The latter gives Buffa an opportunity to expound his ideas of modified Marxism and provides an interesting sidelight on the Russia of today. Antonelli also meets a fascinating woman who bids fair to supplant his former but lost love. Then the body count increases. In the Washington boy's life there is a parallel with Antonelli's own. Neither knows the identity of his true father and perhaps this gives Joseph an extra reason to try to establish Jamaal's innocence. Jamaal would provide a convenient scapegoat - a young black man whose motive, that of greed, would seem to make him the obvious culprit. Antonelli, however, pursues his enquiries in the upper echelons of Californian society, thereby alienating many powerful potential friends and gravely endangering his own life. While the plot and character development of this novel are typically well done and the prose coherent and intelligent (despite someone's misuse of the word 'flaunt' instead of 'flout' in the first few pages) I felt Buffa's courtroom scenes leave a lot to be desired. In a case where a gun is found, after a shooting killing, beside the hand of a man who has in turn been shot by police but about whose responsibility for the first shooting there is doubt, there is not a word about the gun having been fingerprinted nor yet about a paraffin test on the hands of the purported shooter. Balanced against this is the excellent description of the tension and hatred existing between the judge and the prosecuting attorney, a hatred which affects the conduct and outcome of the case. Pressures of the ambitions of dignitaries resting on future elections are well established and adequate motives assigned to suspects. Nonetheless, I feel the omission of forensic detail to be slipshod. The story is narrated in the first person from the point of view of Antonelli yet there are uneasy segues as scenes, which Antonelli did not witness, are described in minute detail in the third person. I felt it made the first person narrative less than convincing. It would have been better either told entirely in the third person or else the author could have adopted a tactic employed by other writers of narrating some chapters in the first person and other chapters in the third. I do not feel that shifting person in the middle of a chapter works Since the author has now progressed through defence, prosecution, judgment and legacy, one wonders what new aspect of the legal system remains to be examined by D. W. Buffa. Editor's note: This is a review of the Australian edition, released in August, 2002. 
Reviewed by Denise Wels, August 2002
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