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One could say that Richard North Patterson has the best of two worlds so far as his background goes. He practised law and studied creative writing. He was an assistant attorney general in Ohio as well as striding very impressive halls of power when being a prosecutor in the Watergate affair. He has been reported as saying that: "Trial lawyers have to be story tellers -- have to arrange complex facts in attractive narratives; grasp character; understand judges, juries, make clients appealing, understandable. They do have a lot of stories to tell." The author amply demonstrates his ability to tell stories and bring life to complex subjects and characters in CONVICTION. Teresa Peralta Paget is one of Mr North Patterson's ongoing characters. He has established in previous books the horrors that she suffered as a child as well as those inflicted on her daughter Elena, now a teenager living with Terri and Terri's husband Chris -- another character who has endured horrors in previous outings. Now Terri is called upon to attempt to extricate Rennell Price from the death sentence which is to be executed in 59 days by the state of California. Price and his elder brother Payton, doomed to die first, were convicted 15 years previously of the murder of a nine-year-old Asian girl, Thuy Sen. It was a particularly horrible crime in which the child asphyxiated on the ejaculate of two men who raped her orally, then they cast her body into the waters of San Francisco Bay. At first, given the history of her own daughter which has an unpleasant resonance with the case which Terri, her husband Chris and stepson Carlo must fight, Terri finds it difficult to feel empathy with her client. Rennell is a large man, an impassive man who has a brutish aspect. Only gradually does Terri discover it is not so much impassivity which her client displays but lack of understanding. The author seems to me to have included rather more didacticism in this work than in previous stories. It is necessary for the reader to understand a lot of legal niceties which influence the smooth flow of the narrative. Carlo, a recent law graduate, is a useful receptacle for instruction by which the reader is also educated. The action, though, does not slow because of the schooling, but is deepened and made more understandable. There are perils a-plenty introduced, including dangers to Terri's family, both from internal divisions -- Elena cannot be brought to understand how her mother can defend someone accused of a crime such as the one perpetrated against herself -- as well as external threat. The author makes a very convincing argument against the death penalty and the strange laws that can ensure the execution of a man despite the realisation of most that he is innocent. The decreasing of the legal avenues open to the defenders is made very exciting indeed, despite what may have, in the less skilled hands of a different writer, proven dry as dust. I would defy any reader to remain unmoved by this skilful tale of implacable injustice visited upon an innocent man by whom so many minds have been revolted.
Reviewed by Denise Pickles, March 2005
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