This is a legal procedural, if that's a thing, with a bit of thriller at the end, as a treat for hanging in there. Andy is a public defender in a rural county in Virginia. He's very good at his job and everyone, especially prosecutors and police, like to tell him how good he is, in a way that eventually made me feel like being a public defender was something to be a little bit ashamed about. Andy agrees; he hates his clients, who he thinks of as basically wastes of life, if not actively subhuman, so it makes sense when, at the beginning of the novel, he tenders his resignation. The question of why he stayed in the job for 17 years is not one that will be answered. He quickly finds a cushy job with a big law office, but before he can start that job he wants to finish up with the accused murderer he is defending.

The murder case is, at first glance, an easy one for the states attorney. The man, Damian Bullins, is a strung-out methhead, an Appalachian yokel stereotype, who is accused of and quickly confesses to the murder of a housewife and paragon of virtue, a devout Mormon and wife of a prominent and respected businessman. But Andy quickly discovers that he can get the confession thrown out. Bullins claims he was hired to take the fall and Andy also finds evidence of motive for the murdered woman's husband. Given that the lead prosecutor is running for election and not interested in this case except as a platform to gain name recognition, it seems clear that Andy can get Bullins off, which is his duty as a defense attorney, even if he doesn't want to.

So legal thrillers can be fun, and since Clark is a lawyer, the procedural stuff was interesting. The plot hummed along, more or less. The issues I had with this book were with the writing, the characters, the utter lack of character development and finally, and probably most troubling, the attitude about people caught in the justice system.

So the writing is serviceable if dull, characters are described by their clothing, some are never described. The characters themselves were either cardboard-thin (the good guys) or paper-thin (the bad guys) and no one ever behaved contrary to the stereo-types established at their introduction. Which meant there was no uncertainty as to who was guilty or what the end point of the book would be, but this book was not interested in suspense or in nuance, which is fine, I think probably some people prefer a mystery to be a sure and well-marked track from A to B.

My biggest issue with this book is how it treated some characters as people and others as not quite human. That Andy needed to complain regularly about how much he hated wasting his time defending people who didn't deserve it and how whoever he was saying this to would agree with him was troubling. While Andy never had any Black clients, despite having a heavy caseload, became noticeable, but was definitely a good choice on the part of the author, given how Andy viewed the people he represented. Andy never once wondered about anyone's past or the reasons that might have caused their addictions or homelessness. I can certainly see that Andy being incurious is central to his character, and so can forgive him for that. I'm less willing to forgive the author, who should, by virtue of his profession, have some passing interest in the complexity of people's lives. ( )