By Margaret S. Hamilton
“I consult my little score cards, but the words on them are suddenly just
words, the future seemingly unknown, unpredictable. Who are you? I
wonder. I try to peer into your mind, but you’ve become illegible. Are you
really willing to listen to my version of events, to give my client the benefit
of the doubt?” (p.4)
Gabriel Urza’s public defender crime novel is set in Reno,
Nevada, the “silver state.” A young mother, Anna Weston, is found brutally
murdered near a silver mine. Public defenders Santi Elcano and Santi’s
supervisory mentor C.J. are tasked with Michael Atwood’s defense.
Atwood’s conviction is based on scanty evidence. Eight
years later, Atwood contacts Elcano from death row. Elcano’s defense of Weston’s
murderer is the main plot thread through the novel.
The book is organized like a trial, Jury Selection to
Verdict, with the timeline continuously shifting back and forth from past to
present. Santi Elcano is the point of view character, recounting his years as a
raw attorney just out of law school to a public defender with eight years in
the courtroom. His court calendar is jammed, his client list too large to
handle, and his supervisor, C.J., exhibits increasingly questionable behavior.
After eight years, Elcano’s innocence is gone, but his moral sense of right and
wrong remains.
Gabriel Urza was a public defender in Reno before he became
a fulltime fiction writer and college professor. His depiction of the Reno
public defender’s office rings true, as does his descriptions of Reno as a
tired gambling town. His prose is excellent, succinct, and not overly literary.
His occasional metaphors sparkle.
Urza’s descriptions of trout fishing in nearby Pyramid Lake
are memorable:
“It was a windswept
morning, and we had the beach nearly to ourselves. We waded out chest high and
set our ladders, then began to cast from the top step out into the choppy
water. Within an hour I had landed five Lahontan cutthroat, each over ten
pounds and longer than my forearm, their bodies powerful against the line, the
bright red of their gills flashing in the slate-grey water. As I reeled in the
sixth, I felt the line tighten, then suddenly go slack; the fish had snapped my
line, taking C.J.’s lure with it.” (p.229)
Though the plot is framed by a murder trial and a client on
death row, Urza focuses on the moral ambiguity of a public defender’s role in a
murder trial. He concludes by implying a major question: can justice in America
be served under the current judicial system?
Readers and writers, do you enjoy reading and/or writing
about courtrooms and legal cases?
Margaret S. Hamilton is writing the third in her Jericho
Mystery series.
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