SLIM AND NONE

Glenn’s novel follows the struggles of a southern lawyer.

The author provides a follow-up to You Have Your Way (2021) with the return of North Carolina attorney Eddie Terrell. Eddie gets his kicks from doing what he does best: hustling up legal work. He is an attorney who is willing to work on a wide variety of cases, be they small claims or real estate litigation. The early pages of the novel find him driving around the southeastern United States investigating leads. He looks into a situation in which a man died in a dumpster in Savannah and reflects on a past case involving a cheating wife and her penchant for writing erotic love poetry. Though he indulges in some leisurely pleasures along the way, like a grilled cheese sandwich doused in ketchup, he asks smart questions and does his due diligence; Glenn focuses on the nuts and bolts of practicing the law rather than melodrama. When Eddie decides against taking the case of a man who was crushed while unloading stone, it does not have an appreciable impact on him—he keeps right on moving (“the only things along the way that were inevitable were death and taxes and lots of cases that just didn’t work out”). The work is best when digging into details. Eddie may not be engaged in the high adrenaline cases of a John Grisham protagonist (though he admires Grisham’s work), but he has much to teach the reader about real jurisprudence. The author illustrates that preparing for a trial is a matter of distilling down a plethora of facts, laws, and other materials; after committing to a tragic medical malpractice case, Eddie has a lot of distilling to do. It is entertaining and instructive to see him in the process.

Though the pace is leisurely, the narrative engagingly illuminates the mechanisms of the legal system.