Santa’s Bookshelf

Santa Claus, reading

Picture Santa Claus sitting in front of a blazing fire in the long, dark evenings up at the North Pole and reading my 2021 book reviews. Well, he’s been diligent, and he has suggestions that may fit people on your gift list who are:

  1. New Jerseyans with a sense of humor (or crime fans with a sense of humor period) Suburban Dicks by Fabian Nicieza or New Jersey Noir: Cape May by Bill Baer
  2. Far East adventurers – The Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotterill or Play the Red Queen by Juris Jurjevics
  3. Aficionados of trans-European capers – The Cut by Chris Brookmyre
  4. Members of the lady spy auxiliary – The Rose Code by Kate Quinn or A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell (I read this, but didn’t review it, unaccountably—amazing true story!)
  5. Paranormal mystery, Blackfeet tribe division – The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones; New Orleans division, Under the Blood Moon by Tracie Provost
  6. The cozy crowd – The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
  7. Teenagers’ parents who might want to be reminded that it could be worse: We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker or Wayward Girls by Claire Matturro & Penny Koepsel
  8. Fans of military adventures – Appointment in Tehran by James Stejskal or the aforesaid Play the Red Queen
  9. Short Story lovers – Best American Mystery & Suspense, edited by Steph Cha
  10. Folks who just need a vacation – Blood Like Rain by Al Tucher or Murder on the Island by Daisy White

False Witness

The standalone thriller begins in the summer of 1998, with the uneasy relationship between Callie and Buddy, which, for his part, seems to revolve solely around sex, rough sex, and keeping his ten-year-old son from knowing what he’s up to.

Then it’s spring 2021, and Callie’s sister Leigh is called on at the last minute to defend an especially brutal serial rapist. Leigh works for a prestigious Atlanta, Georgia, law firm and has only days before jury selection begins. The demeanor of the defendant, Andrew Tenant, puts her off, but she can’t say no without risking her job. Soon she realizes her creepy new client is the grown-up boy from long-ago, when she and Callie were his baby-sitters.

Something bad happened back in 1998, involving Callie and Leigh, and they’ve kept the secret ever since. To Leigh’s dismay, Andrew uses what he knows about it to manipulate her into mounting a vigorous and unethical defense. No matter that she’s convinced he’s guilty.

Leigh is afraid to sabotage the defense in any way, certain that Andrew would not hesitate to harm the people she loves, including Callie. Callie has long-standing substance abuse problems, and some of the most poignant parts of the story are her attempts to calibrate the drugs in her system so she can cope with the demands posed by Andrew’s threats.

There are both good characters and bad in this novel, and the good ones are treated with respect and compassion, despite their flaws. Oh, and wait until you meet Callie and Leigh’s mother! A library full of child-rearing advice wouldn’t have changed her behavior an iota!

The story is set in the midst of the pandemic, and though it’s not about covid, the characters’ everyday lives are affected by it—to mask (or not), the erratic court schedule. The disease is part of the realistic environment of the story. Slaughter, who lives in Atlanta, set the novel there, though it’s not a novel in which place plays a dominant role. Occasionally, the author breaks in and delivers a lecture on, for example, the way drug addiction affects the brain, which derails the story for a few paragraphs and feels unnecessary. Readers put off by cursing will have much to complain about.

I personally found Leigh too repetitive and tiresome with her guilt and self-doubt and her willingness to jump to (consistently wrong) conclusions about what other people are feeling. It felt cliché to make Andrew super-wealthy, and he was over-the-top slimy, but then a psychopath would be extreme, no? Those quibbles aside, the book held my interest and I found more to like than not.

Here’s a recent interview with Karin Slaughter related to this book.

Order False Witness here from Amazon.

Or here from IndieBound.