Friday, May 05, 2017

My Degree of Obsession with Patterson's Degree of Guilt

Somehow, this was a rather satisfying courtroom drama read after ages. I have no idea why but I feel it can be remade as a very nice Japanese dorama.


I’ve cut my teeth on Perry Mason - our family had loads of those. And libraries all around had all we didn’t. But I doubt anyone can have read all of them these days let alone all Erle Stanley Gardner's output.


And, of course, years later, John Grisham took over that spot on the bookshelf.



After that the genre did not throw itself my way until I found Degree of Guilt by Richard North Patterson in a relative’s house. I needed something to read and I read it.

It was just one of those books I couldn’t really put down and was very handy as it came at a time when I was home alone and I don’t sleep well at all at such times, especially on a hot summer's night. So bad reading light and all, I sped through the book in a couple of days and nights.

I liked it from a couple of points of view, and one of those is the whodunnit part. Perhaps it’s because at two points I guessed the ‘who’. Not that it was easy but I liked the way it was crafted.

It’s fairly pacy, racy in a minor way and has all the huge drama of a TV Nordic Noir drama.

Apparently there’s a TV movie of this book too! I’d want to watch that. Though someone says it’s a mashup of two of his books.

Basically, the protagonist is a male lawyer. He has a son. The mother of the boy is a major mystery figure. She has a nice figure too, one figures out from Page One on.

The lawyer has a sidekick - a she. She’s smart. And go figure! Maybe not hour glass but good enough to warrant a scene where the abovementioned two ladies subliminally sniff each other out warily and with veiled hostility.

The book opens with a corpse. A dead man with his pants around his ankles.

The man is a writer. With a mother complex. And a perverted degree of fandom for a certain actress.

The actress had committed suicide sometime before the book begins.

And then there’s a psychiatrist, also dead a priori.

And he has a daughter and he left tapes of his sessions with clients.

Go figure! And a lady judge.

Yes. All that makes for a good slavering read! Don’t save it for a rainy day - this summer read:



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