THE FIRST LAW

It’s lawyers vs. cops, rent-a-cops vs. cops, cops vs. cops in Lescroart’s latest big bite of Bay City malfeasance (The Oath, Feb. 2002, etc.).

Ever since its vigilante days, the San Francisco Police Department hasn’t been able to guarantee every single downtown business the level of security they’d all like. So the slack’s been taken up by private-security firms like WGP, Inc., a corporation Dismas Hardy and David Freeman have named in a $30 million suit for systematic criminal harassment of undesirables and former clients balking at skyrocketing rates—even without knowing that the firm’s businessman/philanthropist head Wade Panos, who also walks one of his own beats, is secretly helping the Russian National Treasury launder money and dump diamonds on the world market. When Sam Silverman, the pawnbroker friend of Lt. Abe Glitsky’s father, is killed in a botched robbery, Glitsky, the former Homicide chief banished to Payroll by a bullet wound, and Hardy, attorney for prime suspect John Holiday, take a lively interest in the case, especially when three follow-up murders seem to put Holiday even more firmly in the frame. Before Glitsky can press his connections in the D.A.’s office or Hardy put out the word about his client’s alibi for two of the crimes, however, the case is sewn up by WGP’s employees, who supply crucial evidence that Holiday and Dis insist can’t be authentic. Now that Lescroart has unlimbered his big guns—and it takes forever for him to get them ready to fire—the stage is set for a no-holds-barred confrontation between Dis and Co. (minus Freeman, lying in a coma after a savage beating) and Panos and his far-reaching tentacles. The resulting body count should put a serious dent in traffic jams on the Golden Gate Bridge.

The sturdy but simple conflict between Establishment villains and a heroic band of merry men is stretched to the breaking point by male-bonding badinage and felonies obbligato.