Rich Blood by Robert Bailey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Jason Rich, fresh out of rehab and bar discipline, is an ambulance-chasing personal injury attorney who has never taken a case all the way to a jury trial. His sister Jana is a former beauty queen who cheated on her husband, a rich doctor, takes drugs, and is accused of murdering her husband. There’s bad blood between them, but she calls on Jason to defend her and he agrees to do it mainly for his nieces’ sake. I’ll skip the details of the investigation and the trial to avoid spoilers but the case does go all the way to trial.
The blurb on the cover quotes another author as saying it’s a “deliciously clever legal thriller.” That’s not accurate on either count. It’s not particularly clever nor much of a legal thriller, but I will say it’s worth reading if you’re the patient sort. There is a psychological heuristic known as the peak-end rule that says an experience is remembered as a whole based on only two points in time: the peak experience and the end. In this book, both come in the last 50 pages, which is why I say you need to be patient. It’s rather boring for the rest of it. The first 200 pages or so are mostly filled with descriptions of how Jason has messed up his life and is about to fall off the wagon again and similar unflattering facts about Jana. The investigation by Jason and his team consists mostly of interviewing all the obvious witnesses and doing a little bit of physical surveillance. They all say pretty much the same thing which points to Jana’s guilt. There’s no cleverness in that. The courtroom part starts around page 280 and isn’t full of any surprises, either. I certainly never felt “thrilled.” But the author does manage to end with a couple of surprises, provided more by an unlikely last-minute stroke of luck (a sudden memory) than by any cleverness on Jason’s part and by some post-trial revelations. Still, it leaves the reader with a feel-good “end” that proves the truth of the Peak-end rule. At the end you feel like you’ve enjoyed it, even if you were bored for 80% of it. If you like true legal thrillers I would recommend Scott Turow or Michael Connelly over this author.