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It's shortly after 5 am, and I have just finished reading Perri O'Shaughnessy's new mystery, UNLUCKY IN LAW. I started reading at about 7 pm last night. This ought to be the best recommendation a reviewer can give a book. UNLUCKY IN LAW is the fifth novel written by the American sisters Pamela O'Shaughnessy, a former trial lawyer, and Mary, a former editor, and featuring the often unlucky but always quick-witted trial lawyer Nina Reilly in the sleuth's role. In this novel, the widowed Nina's life has become quite complicated, having moved to her Pacific Coast hometown of Monterey, California from the shores of Lake Tahoe, with her reluctant teenage son in tow. She has made this move in order to live with colleague and lover Paul von Wagoner, who saved her life in the last book, but is seriously bad news. At the same time, the ethically uncompromising, debonair senior partner of her law firm, 81-year-old Holocaust refugee Klaus Pohlmann, is clearly losing it, and needs to retire before he causes his clients to lose their cases -- and their freedom. The suspense plots in Nina's personal life aren't whether she and her firm will respectively unload Paul and Pohlmann, but when and how. This plot isn't left to simmer long before the sisters O'Shaughnessy introduce a far more riveting one. What appears to Nina's law firm and the country D.A. to be an open-and-shut murder case turns out, after some shrewd investigation by Nina, Paul, and Nina's friend, the devil-may-care lesbian DNA analyst Ginger Hirabayashi, to cover a messy conspiracy that may determine the fate of two families and the entirety of Russia. With the clock ticking, witnesses lying, and Nina's own suspicions that the young accused man she defends may be a more innocent soul than her own lover, the novel races through its convoluted yet apparently plausible tour of psychological chaos and political conspiracy. What I assume is Pamela O'Shaughnessy's insider knowledge of American trial law lends rich detail to the story. This description avoids didacticism and confusion by displaying Nina's passion for a discipline she practices as an art form. In fact, the characters' debates about how to practice law transparently read as pretty good advice -- or perhaps provocation -- for creative writers among the readership. "Look here," Pohlmann tells Nina during a lunch recess from the trial, "Do you know what happens when a lawyer sits up all night memorising old testimony and reports and concocting long lists and so forth? . . . She sacrifices the ability to listen to the testimony as it comes from the witness's mouth. She is so busy checking off items, thumbing through exhibits, flipping through paper, she hears nothing." Given the number of characters introduced in UNLUCKY IN LAW, it is impressive that most are invested with complex characters, multiple personae, and not only conflicting allegiances but also engaging, human internal conflicts. Without giving the ending away, I should say that, ultimately, this novel's conflict involves not the secrets of the past, but the characters' struggles to determine what kind of future they want for themselves and their varied communities, knowing that there is never any straightforward right decision. This makes UNLUCKY IN LAW a great thriller, but also a book with a bit more depth, worth reading even after Nina's client's case is closed.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, December 2004
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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