Bookreporter.com - MISSING WITNESS by Gordon Campbell

MISSING WITNESS
Gordon Campbell
William Morrow
Legal Thriller
ISBN: 9780061337512

MISSING WITNESS by Gordon Campbell (a trial attorney in Salt Lake City, Utah) takes place in Phoenix, Arizona in 1973 and is told through the voice of Doug McKenzie, a newly-minted attorney who has turned down an offer to practice with a prestigious San Francisco firm for the chance to litigate in his hometown of Phoenix as an associate in a smaller, less lustrous partnership. The reason is that McKenzie wishes to work with his role model, a criminal attorney named Dan Morgan. He gets his chance when Rita Eddington, accompanied by her 12-year-old daughter Miranda, pays a visit to Travis, her estranged husband. Travis is shot to death, with mother and daughter being the only eyewitnesses. When Rita is charged with murder, Travis’s father, a local landowner of great wealth, retains Morgan to defend his daughter-in-law.

The incident has left Miranda in a catatonic state, so that she is unable to testify as to what happened between her father and mother. Yet Morgan, an eccentric, hard-drinking litigator who is able to think outside the box, believes he can successfully defend his client with a daring strategy. McKenzie quickly learns, however, that life in a law firm is not at all what he imagined it would be, even as he slowly becomes aware that his hometown, which he thought he knew so well, hides secrets at every turn, one of which comes back to haunt both Morgan and McKenzie when they least suspect it.

Campbell is a masterful and spellbinding wordsmith whose ability does not begin and end at creating and telling a superb story. One example: a brief but important vignette in the book takes place in Henry Africa’s, a San Francisco fern bar that reached the height of its popularity in the early 1970s. I spent a great deal of time in that establishment, and Campbell’s description of it, from décor to ambience, is so spot-on that while reading the passages concerning it, I could once again taste the Irish coffee that I drank on an almost daily basis there. Those familiar with 1973 Phoenix undoubtedly will feel the same way.

On top of everything, the author leaves his readers with an ending that is incredibly uplifting, unbelievable in some ways yet ultimately entirely credible. The last three paragraphs are worth the price of the book alone (don’t peek ahead, for if you do, the ending will mean nothing to you) yet encapsulate the one word that is the motivator behind the main story: hope.

MISSING WITNESS seems to have been published with little fanfare, yet this is the type of novel that will be recommended, passed around, talked about and read multiple times.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.