Dark Justice
A Novel of Suspense
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- € 6,99
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- € 6,99
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Suffering from courtroom burnout, attorney Ben Kincaid heads to the picturesque Pacific Northwest for some much-needed R and R. But Ben's blissful getaway becomes a busman's holiday in the small town of Magic Valley, where a pitched battle between the local logging industry and crusading conservationists has led to brutal murder.
Years earlier, professional activist George Zakin was successfully defended against a charge of murder by a fledgling attorney named Ben Kincaid. Now, accused of viciously killing a lumberjack, Zakin is counting on Ben to duplicate that long-ago courtroom coup. With the odds stacked against him, Ben walks into a war zone in the courtroom . . . and a potential killing field in Magic Valley, an explosive place where allies and enemies are hard to tell apart--and digging for the truth is as good as digging your grave.
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The eighth in a series of popular courtroom cliffhangers, Bernhardt's newest Ben Kincaid novel (after Extreme Justice) finds the savvy defense attorney in a tiny logging town in the Pacific Northwest. The sinister forces at work behind Magic Valley's Bunyan-esque simplicity emerge when a tree-cutter explodes in anger and kills a local lumberjack--and Ben's old client, George Zakin, is suspected of the foul play. Called on to defend this man again (six years earlier Zakin had been accused and acquitted of an ecoterrorism homicide), Ben reluctantly takes the case. Ben's investigation of the other suspects--a scar-faced drug lord, the mysterious Bigfoot creature often sighted in the thick, dark woods, the leader of a covert logging consortium called "The Cabal" and many a vicious redneck snarling repetitiously about "tree-huggers"--brings Ben into dangerous contact with the Magic Valley's underbelly. The sexiness of Ben's opponent, "stunning young prosecutor" "Granny" Adams, raises the courtroom stakes. But somehow--perhaps because the cranky old hanging judge would rather be fishing--these scenes fail to deliver the drama they promise. Bernhardt juices the suspense with chapter-ending teasers ("The secret would have to die. With her."), but the gratuitous violence and oversimplification of the logging controversy keep the potboiler on medium-high at best.
