Lives in Bedford, comes to FW, very nice man - uses CDT ( )

JOHN Grisham has a lot to answer for. He was one of the first writers of blockbuster legal thrillers and paved the way for a host of imitators.

While Mark Gimenez is not quite “a major new talent,” his debut novel The Colour of Law is an entertaining and competent book in the Grisham mould.

It is a universal maxim that children and animals will always steal the scene and, like Grisham, Gimenez uses the device of a cute, precociously intelligent and threatened child to grab the reader’s sympathy, and redeem the hero.

Despite its blatant manipulation of the sensibilities, this is a ploy that usually works in the hands of any even halfway decent writer — and a decent writer Gimenez certainly is.

The initial scenario is all too familiar to anyone who has read a legal thriller in the last decade: corporate lawyer A Scott Fenney is a brilliantly successful lawyer in an enormously successful firm earning unbelievable sums of money and lording as one of the crème de la crème of Dallas society.

His former best friend Bobby Herrin has nothing in common with him apart from his profession: Bobby is a down-and-out store-front criminal lawyer from the worst part of town. He has nothing going for him except the goodwill of his many impoverished clients.

When Fenney is manoeuvered into defending a prostitute accused of murdering the son of the man tipped to be the next US president, the firm hires Bobby Herrin to take over the case.

Naturally, nothing goes according to plan and in the best tradition of moral American writing, Fenney has to choose between keeping his prestigious job, his beautiful wife, his sexy car, his expensive home and his hard-won position in society, or saving a possibly innocent woman from being railroaded into the electric chair.

The book wouldn’t be over 400 pages long if he capitulated to self-interest, so it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that Fenney aligns himself with the side of righteousness, loses everything apart from his daughter, but saves his client and regains his integrity.

The Colour of Law is written to a tried and tested formula, relying heavily on clichés and caricatures, but Gimenez sets out to entertain, not to write a literary masterpiece.

This is fast-paced, excellent light reading for people who want something more substantial than a magazine, and it should sell well at airport bookstores.

John Grisham does have a lot to answer for, and three cheers for him if he has encouraged writers like Gimenez, who can hold one’s interest for the entire duration of a flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town. ( )

This is a first novel by a lawyer cynically setting up the franchise on a character he expects to run and run. It is novel-writing by numbers, with more than the expectation that film rights will follow. Does that sound bad?

Actually I enjoyed it a lot. As a lawyer Gimenez feels compelled to explain more about the law than is strictly necessary for the reader (and I expect that was much more of that before the editors go to work). The central characters are types rather than rounded human beings. The plot is full of holes. Who cares? It's an excuse for Gimenez to write a satire about Texas politics, greed, rapaciousness, racism, hypocrisy and lots else besides. It's essentially a Western set in Dallas. The man in the black hat becomes, reluctantly, the man in the white hat, teams up with his old buddy, and rides into the sunset until the next installment.

If the subsequent novels are simply cranked out on a production line, like a number of other crime novellists I could mention, Gimenez will sink from view. But if there's enough satire and spice to tease the reader, he could last the course. ( )

Good first novel by Gimenez. I hope his writing gets better. Sometimes it felt a bit repetitious. Although being from Dallas it was fun to read his description of The Bubble. So dead on! ( )

“The Color of Law�? by Mark Gimenez is a fast paced legal thriller by a new author. A. Scott Fenney went straight from fame in football to a successful career in a Dallas law firm. He has it all: the client, the house, the club memberships, the cars, the wife and daughter. Or does he? He’s about to find out when a judge assigns him a pro-bono case defending a black heroin-addicted prostitute accused of murdering the son of a senator. The pressure is on as Scott is stuck in a no-win proposition. This is an immensely satisfying first novel with well developed characters, an intense plot, and a dash of humor.