I finished this book over the weekend. It's a continuation of the Paul Madriani series of legal thrillers. There is plenty of very good courtroom drama, which I love. I loved reading the old Perry Mason books, and I also love Philip Margolin's courtroom dramas among others.

Steve Martini may be writing the best courtroom scenes in crime/mystery fiction today, in my opinion.

In this book, an attorney/author is found murdered in his hotel room, and the logical suspect is the white supremacist hotel worker who was taking him his food. Not only does the kid have a motive (hate, because of the subject matter of the guy's book, which is an interesting story in itself), but he had opportunity, access, and he left physical evidence at the scene. Then he ran afterwards without clocking out or reporting the body.

But of course he didn't do it. And it's up to Madriani to do his best to get the kid off, since Paul is friends with the boy's father.

The subject of the guy's first book is the language of the Constitution, which still to this day has not been changed in order to delete the language legitimizing slavery in the United States. This language is "dead letter law" since it has been made obsolete by later amendments, but the words themselves are still there. The author has pointed this out in an inflammatory manner, igniting racially fueled violent civil unrest in many cities around the country.

And his second book purports to be about a letter, called the "J" letter, which details a "deal" to legitimize slavery in order to get the young country formed. (This part is fictional - there is no "J" letter in real life...)
This promises to ignite more racial unrest.

An excellent read with a good ending and which mirrors the political times when it was written - in other words, NOW.

One paragraph struck me as I was journaling about stuff in it recently.

"Nor could it be possible in the Age of Reason to foresee a Social Security system that if run by a private business would result in their arrest, prosecution, and conviction for operating a Ponzi scheme. In the real world, taking invested funds in the form of Social Security taxes, paying current claims, and skimming the rest for other purposes is called embezzlement. When government does it, it is simply called politics. In either case the arithmetic is always the same. When the scheme goes belly-up, its operators, if they're smart, will be in Brazil, or, in the case of Congress, retired, which is the political equivalent of being in Brazil."

And the next paragraph:

"With all of this, the people in what is touted as the greatest democracy on the planet have no effective recourse. They cannot act directly to fix any of the obvious open sores or seeping wounds in their own government, because the founders didn't trust them with the only effective medicine, the power to amend their own Constitution. That is reserved for the serpent its creators never saw."

I think these paragraphs are interesting. They are out of context but I think they sort of speak for themselves. They are part of a bigger discussion (by Martini speaking through his foil, Paul Madriani) about the problems with our government and why they have festered as they have.

Beyond this criticism, this was an exciting and compelling story to read.