Marty Nickerson has recently given up her secure position in a Massachusetts DA’s office and gone into private practice with her lover Harry Madigan and a young assistant they poached from the formidable District Attorney, Geraldine Schilling. Their first client is Buck Hammond, who fatally shot the man who raped and murdered his seven year old son and whose only chance of being acquitted is to plead temporary insanity as the whole incident was captured by TV cameras. Then, as Buck’s trial is about to start, Sonia Baker turns up at the office with a distressed daughter and a broken arm. She is still in hospital when her violently abusive partner is found stabbed to death.
Neither wants to co-operate in their own defence. Neither deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison. Defending two such unpromising clients fully tests Marty’s legal, diplomatic and courtroom skills and leaves her feeling vulnerable, harried, and at times inadequate, but always invigorated by her desire to uphold the rights of the individual over a prejudicial legal system.
The action is short and sharp throughout the book with the weight of added complications keeping the tension well-paced and the story involving. Rose Connors was a trial attorney for 18 years and it is this experience which makes her able to raise issues about justice and the presumption of innocence and set them against the tactics and theatrics of counsels who know the key to winning a case lies in jury manipulation. I was fascinated by the way Buck’s trial felt like a play, with defined parts and roles; a drama that only once (forgivably) slipped into melodrama.
I learnt a lot about court procedure, verdicts and pleas and about battered woman syndrome and temporary insanity; I cared about Marty with her self-deprecating humour and inability to accept being patronised and out-flanked; mostly I got caught up in the emotion of injustice and found myself arguing back at the hateful prosecutor and the bitch of a judge. There was no doubt that I got involved.
Throughout Temporary Sanity there is no blurring of right and wrong or good
and evil and it is always pretty evident who the winners ought to be but, as
with any good writer who knows how to engender suspense, Rose Connors keeps
the tension going right until the very end. I’ll confess I covered the final
page with my hand so I couldn’t see the jury foreman’s verdict. I expect you
will too.
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Ruth Wade
Rose Connnor’s first book Absolute Certainty was a finalist for the 2002
Mary Higgins Clark Award. She is currently working on the next Marty Nickerson
novel.