Book Report Friday: The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

I recently joined Goodreads and, while I’m a big fan so far, I do wish that they had something like Amazon.com or Netflix do that would recommend books based on the titles that you’ve already reviewed. While poking around on the site searching for this non-existant unicorn, I discovered that there is a section where you can enter giveaways to be sent free books. Now, the only thing that I love more than books is free books. I entered for every single giveaway that looked remotely interesting.

Imagine my surprise when I actually won a free book. Imagine my further surprise that I truly enjoyed it. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but apparently there is such thing as a free book.

(FCC Disclosure: I am writing this review based on a copy that I was given for free. Although if you haven’t figured that out from the first few paragraphs of this post, I have some lovely coloring books that I could recommend for you instead.)

(Have I used the word free enough? Free free free free free free freeeeeee).

The Devil Amongst Lawyers is part court drama, part historical fiction. I imagine that one of the reasons that I won the giveaway is that I have a thing for legal/thriller/mystery books. Or, as I liked to call them, “I Sure Wish I Was at the Beach Reads.” I also have a thing for history. And by “thing,” I mean “willingly gave up part of my Summer to take a graduate-level history class.” Why? Because I could. Now, sometimes when you combine two things that I love, like chocolate and hummus, the results are…. discomfiting. But, sometimes when you combine two things that I love, like chocolate and peanut butter, the results are even more awesome than the sum of their parts. This book? Definitely falls into the more awesome category.

The book tells the story of a young woman who is on trial in a small Appalachian town for killing her father and of the reporters who come to “tell” her story. And I put tell in quotation marks not just because I like to mess with punctuation, but because the big-city reporters pretty much resort to making stuff up. It’s a nod to the yellow journalism around the (previous) turn of the century. I actually found the parts of the plot that revolved around the journalists to be somewhat heavy-handed. It erred a little bit on the side of telling instead of showing. It was mostly forgivable, however, because I liked the rest of the book so much.

Mostly, what I liked about this book was the way that it put a story into a historical context without the historical bits seeming forced or trite. The historic details were there to support the story and to move it along, not to show off that the author had done her research. It was fun to read a throwaway line about something that had gone on around that time and to say to myself, “I know exactly what she’s talking about” without having it drummed into me exactly what the author knows about the period. Basically, I like to feel smart. :p

I did think that the pacing was slightly off, things built up to what seemed like it should have been a bigger ending but ended up feeling small. I also saw the outcome of the trial (and the truth about what really happened) coming a mile away. In this case, it didn’t seem like it was such a problem. The trial aspect of the book was more of the framework of the story and less the ends of it. Sharyn McCrumb does a great job of introducing little questions and mysteries and then slowly answering them. The writers on Lost could have learned a thing or two from her. It was more about the journey than it was about the destination.

In short, I’d give the book a solid 4 out of 5 stars. This book won’t change your life, but it is a pleasant way to spend a Summer evening.