ABOVE THE LAW
Tim Green
Grand Central Publishing
Thriller
ISBN: 9780446401500
Tim Green has built up an enviable bibliography over the past several years following a career as an NFL defensive end and concurrent with the practice of law in upstate New York. ABOVE THE LAW, his latest book, features the surprising and welcome return of a character from a previous work, with a few new twists and some intriguing turns.
Casey Jordan appeared in Green’s THE LETTER OF THE LAW. An attorney with a high-powered law firm, Casey found herself inadvertently being a party to a miscarriage of justice and set about to balance the scales, as it were, in an ingenious if slightly unorthodox manner. ABOVE THE LAW finds Casey in somewhat different circumstances, having left her white-shoe firm to open a women’s legal aid clinic funded primarily by private contributions. Jordan undertakes the case of a pivotal client whose circumstances will soon change everything for her.
Isadora is an illegal immigrant who faces deportation and separation from her child, born in the United States and regarded as an “anchor baby.” Her husband, Elijandro, was recently killed in a hunting accident involving his employer, Senator Chase, a prominent Texas politician who has his eye on the Oval Office. Isadora believes that her husband was in fact murdered by the senator, who suspected his wife of being involved with Elijandro. Casey manages to keep mother and infant together, but as she and her legal investigator attempt to conduct their own investigation into Elijandro’s death, they keep running into dead ends that are in fact cleverly constructed roadblocks: no one wants to take Chase on.
Meanwhile, Chase is hiding much more than his deliberate murder of Elijandro. Illegal immigrants in his employ are quietly disappearing, taken in trucks in the dead of night to unknown destinations. Casey, assisted by her legal investigator Jose, begins turning over rocks that are only reluctantly dislodged as a monstrous scheme is uncovered, an event that will have far-reaching repercussions both north and south of the Rio Grande River.
Over the course of his last few novels, Green has been favoring his expanding body of readers with more complex and interesting plots. This novel is no exception. The chemistry between Casey and Jose, both of whom are more troubled than they initially seem, is predictable, but Green takes them and his readers through some twists and turns, resulting in surprises that continue right up until the conclusion of the book. From beginning to end, ABOVE THE LAW gives more than its fair measure of money and time spent.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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