Burden Of Turow

By John Skow

TITLES: FAMILIAR LEGAL TERMS

PUBLISHERS: TOO MANY OF THEM

AUTHORS: LAWYERS ON THEIR LUNCH HOURS

THE BOTTOM LINE: Is your mouthpiece taking notes to keep you out of jail or to put you in Chapter 6?

All rise. Let it be stipulated that George V. Higgins (Defending Billy Ryan, Kennedy for the Defense) writes about rascally lawyers better than any other novelist now at large.

Without objection, so entered. But the matter before the court is not the literary standing of the estimable Higgins. It is a spreading gray ooze of lesser lawyer novels with indistinguishable titles, written perhaps for love, perhaps for glory, but probably to capitalize on the dumbfounding popularity of lawyer novels by Scott Turow (The Burden of Proof, Presumed Innocent) and John Grisham (The Firm, The Pelican Brief).

Why is jurisprudence suddenly the hot new pop read? The U.S. does have more lawyers, many no doubt underemployed and hungry, than anyplace else in the universe. Probably, however, we have more accountants and termite exterminators as well, and they remain decently silent. Anyway, this year lawyers, next year civil engineers or professional bowlers. Or a heartwarming resurgence of doctor-nurse romances. In any case, the entire, ever wistful publishing industry now chases riches through barratry, the offense of excessive litigation. There is a cranked-out feel to most legal thrillers. Virtually all are blurbed as the work of the next Turow, which may not be an endorsement, since Turow's plodding prose can be a way not of passing time but doing it. Still, a few lawyer novels pass minimal standards as survival gear. For the next time you're sentenced to 7 to 10 years between planes at O'Hare, here's a sampling of legal thrillers:

Mitigating Circumstances (Dutton; $20), by Nancy Taylor Rosenberg, needs some mitigating by an editor. Or maybe not; the prose is so purple it's golden. An aerobic love passage ends with the heroine, an assistant prosecutor named Lily Forrester, hyperventilating as follows: "Her body was screaming at her, begging her, demanding more. Perhaps she could actually feed this desire, this need." A lawyer's body wouldn't really carry on this way, would it?

Forrester has other problems. A career thug attacks her and rapes her teenage daughter. Not very believably, she tracks him down and shoots him, bang-bang. Melodrama ripens as a shrewd cop attached to her department reports his progress in tracking down the killer, who of course is Lily herself. Will he turn her in? Not before he chews some scenery: "I am the law. Not the judges on their high benches too far from it to even smell it. I'm the one who gets shot at. The one who has to inhale the rotting flesh of the society we live in . . . There is a god, lady, and he lives down here in the gutter with the likes of me." Right, Officer.

Regardless of locale, most lawyer novels are easterns, in which the court system is a semicorrupt mess but the heroic judge/prosecutor/defense attorney finds the loophole that achieves justice. This one is a horseless, string-'em- up western whose message is that black hats are felonizing homesteaders and courts are run by sociobabbling liberals. Come back, Shane.

Death Penalty (HarperCollins; $20), by William J. Coughlin, is a wily, likable tale that goes a long way toward justifying the genre. Author Coughlin, a judge and former courtroom lawyer, gives us that always popular hero, the lone-wolf defense attorney with a drinking problem and an unbroken record of outsmarting prosecutors. Charley Sloan used to be rich, married, drunk and successful, the fastest legal gun in Detroit. Then, for awhile, he was just drunk. Now he goes to AA meetings, thirsts ruefully and scuffles to rebuild his practice. His clients are dodgy and unreliable, which is why they are clients. There's a rape victim who, alas, has a record of soliciting, a sodden legal colleague who needs help writing an appeal, and Dr. Death, an arrogant physician who assists suicides. The plots tangle believably to reveal Sloan's edgy, honorable character, and he's good company.

Probable Cause (Simon & Schuster; $19), by Grif Stockley, is another good- guy defense attorney yarn, set in, of all places, Little Rock, Arkansas. (This is pre-Ascension Little Rock; there's not a word about Bill Clinton's cat.) Gideon Page is a likable lunkhead with a pretty teenage daughter who gives him fits and a social worker lady friend afflicted by perplexing bouts of chastity. He's a pretty good lawyer but a bad legal politician, and he's only a few dollars and a credit card away from bankruptcy. By midnovel his only solvent client is a brilliant but self-righteous black psychologist who's charged with murder because a young woman, his white girlfriend's mentally ill % daughter, died during a mishandled electroshock treatment. Worse, the mother, a mercenary beauty, stands to inherit a big chunk of money left in trust to her dead daughter. The case has a bad smell to it, Page knows, partly because the interracial angle won't please a jury and partly because the psychologist may actually be stone-cold guilty. The working out of all this is a tough, gritty puzzle, but if author Stockley writes another Page whydunit (this is his second), the poor guy needs, oh, maybe a Harley chopper or an eight-blade jackknife for enhanced machismo. And please, let him find a new female main squeeze.

Degree of Guilt (Knopf; $23), by Richard North Patterson, is slick, sexy and headed (it says here) for your mega-mall's multi-plex. This means it is overblown and underbelievable, but who cares? Chris Paget is a high-powered San Francisco lawyer with great suits and an important wristwatch. His client, Mary Carelli, the nation's most recognizable gorgeous TV journalist, is accused of shooting the country's most hairy-chested famous male novelist during an interview. She insists that Paget take her case. She is, you see, the mother of Paget's 15-year-old son Carlo. She and Paget were, years ago, hotshot young Washington lawyers on opposite sides of an influence-peddling case that brought down a sitting President. We believe this, don't we?

That's the first 25 of 547 pages. For those not put off by the sudsy plotting and the PEOPLE magazine cast, the legal machinations are satisfactorily intricate. If the novelist tried to rape Carelli, as she insists, why does an apparently honest psychologist say the writer was impotent? And why did Carelli bring a pistol to the interview? There's a lot of grotesque sex (Disgusting! Tell us more!) unveiled in the courtroom. As is customary in lawyer novels, Paget has a pretty female assistant for love interest and a frigid witch of a female prosecutor to outwit. Microwave popcorn (Newman's Own, unflavored, add salt and real butter) is recommended with this one.