SILENT JUSTICE

With a bow to Jonathan Harr and A Civil Action, Ben Kincaid, Bernhardt’s fictional Saint Jude of lawyers, puts his career and sanity at risk as he takes on a local manufacturing company whose careless disposal of cleaning solvents contaminated a municipal water supply. Righteous rage crackles through the ninth legal procedural in Bernhardt’s Justice series (Dark Justice, 1998, etc.), as it becomes clear that the real enemy Kincaid must defeat is not Myron Blaylock, the Waspish president of an Oklahoma small town’s largest employer, or Blaylock’s suavely brutal defense lawyer, Charlton Colby, but a legal system that makes it nearly impossible for people without money or political clout to win a civil suit in federal court. In one corner are Blaylock, with millions to spend on legal fees, and Colby, a thoroughly ruthless litigator eager to wring every penny he can from his client. In the other corner cower 11 lower—middle-class families whose children died horribly from drinking and bathing in poisoned tap water. Though he hates civil litigation, “because there’s nothing civil about it,” Kincaid agrees to sue Blaylock on the families’ behalf without considering the financial and psychological costs. Even with the help of his plucky law-student assistant, Christina McCall, his hand-wringing office manager Jones, and his dogged p.i. Loving, Kincaid begins to crack under the stress. Meanwhile, an anonymous fiend is torturing and murdering current and former Blaylock employees who can’t tell him where “the merchandise” is. In tying his beautifully sketched courtroom battle with the grisly psychokiller subplot, Bernhardt reduces what should have been an inspiring David-versus-Goliath melodrama about the venality of the legal system to just another ultraviolent, awkwardly plotted page-turner. A harrowing cautionary tale of splendid suspense and superb courtroom jousting cheapened by a pointlessly violent climax and a deus-ex-machina ending.