Judgment Day

Sheldon Siegel
MacAdam Cage Publishing (2008)
ISBN 9781596922907
Reviewed by Narayan Radhakrishnan for RebeccasReads (5/08)

If you are looking forward to reading a Sheldon Siegel thriller each year, you are going to be disappointed. Siegel is not your regular off-the block lawyer-author who religiously delivers a legal thriller each year, come rain, sleet or shine…. A Siegel thriller is bound to hit the market once every three years or so, and whenever a Siegel novel is out, I make it a point to religiously read it. And after a four-year hiatus, when I got my hands on the new Mike Daley thriller “Judgment Day” by Sheldon Siegel, my joy knew no bounds.  The novel was well worth the wait.

Mike Daley is the series protagonist of this lawyer and author. A former priest, former corporate lawyer, and former husband to the female protagonist in the series, lawyer Rosie Fernandez, the criminal lawyer has had a tumultuous life -- both personal and professional. Marriage with Rosie never worked out, but as a professional team, there is nothing to stop them. Rosie is back on her feet after a life threatening cancer problem (“Final Verdict”) and now both of them are hard at work in trying to prove a client’s innocence. The only problem is that the client has already been found guilty and is now facing an execution date. Now better believe this one, the two lawyers are fighting for a client who himself is a lawyer (a mob lawyer by name Nathan Fineman) who is accused of murdering three persons, one of whom was a lawyer.  With lawyers, lawyers everywhere, is it no wonder why Shakespeare once remarked “the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”

Fineman solidly proclaims his innocence and his defense is that he has been a victim of a police frame-up. Daley would have been the first to use this line of defense…but he has a problem: the policeman who reached the scene of the crime first was Daley’s father, now deceased. A professional success for Daley would mean a reputation failure for Daley’s father. And when judgment day finally approaches, Daley finds that the day is not only crucial for Daley the lawyer, but also for Mike Daley the son.

The courtroom drama, as always, is simply crackling; the expertise with which Siegel describes the justice system, in all its procedural grandeur, convinces us that the author must have been one heck of a lawyer himself. And without being a spoilsport, let me say it, the ending is, mildly put, stunning. “Judgment Day” is highly enjoyable, a book worth buying and reading.

Comments

[heather (errantdreams)]

While there are definitely some authors who can religiously turn out books 'come rain, sleet or shine' and do an awesome job of it (Nora Roberts comes to mind), often it's the ones that put books out when they're ready who turn out to be the best!

This sounds like a fantastic premise.