High Crimes

Legal thriller put together pretty well. Writing style is fun and interesting. This book was written 20 years ago so you have to allow for the massive change in technology and two decades of history; nevertheless, plausible in today's environment. Takes a shot a military justice. There were so many unexpected surprises, and the intensity was great!

Claire Heller Chapman is a very successful attorney who teaches law. One day at the mall with her husband and daughter, police start chasing her husband and claim he is someone else who committed a terrible crime in another country, El Salvador. He was a member of a secret military group and 87 innocent villagers were murdered. She finds out he was accused and escaped, changed his face and name and they have been married for several years. He said that he doesn't know who killed the villagers as he was in a different part of the village when it happened. Claire joins a military attorney and a civilian attorney who is an expert on military justice. She finds enough evidence to clear her husband only to find he and another man from the show more group were guilty. Apparently there was a movie about this with Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd. I enjoyed the book. show less

High-profile attorney and Harvard Law professor Claire Heller Chapman puts her career on the line to defend her husband, Tom, after he is revealed to be a former secret operative for the U.S. government and is arrested for an unspeakable atrocity committed some thirteen years earlier.

There’s a lot of courtroom drama as the military seemingly tries to make Tom the scapegoat for the atrocity. Claire is a fighter and there are lots of conflicts between her and the military prosecutors and judge. The evidence that slowly appears made me keep guessing as to whether Tom was guilty of not. This was a fast paced suspenseful read with many twists.

This early Finder is not a corporate thriller (for which he is better known), but rather a legal one and not very original (perfect husband with mysterious past is outed and now forced to come clean and answer for his alleged crimes). I found myself skimming whole pages of courtroom drama and scenes featuring a whiny brat. Somehow I don’t think I missed anything. A lot of the dialogue at the end, where a certain corrupt General was on the witness stand, were almost word for word lifted from A Few Good Men (You NEED me on that wall!). I could only picture Nicholson in my head while reading this part. Ditto for And Justice For All (You’re out of order!). It was laughable.

It was patently obvious that hubby wasn’t as innocent as he show more made out to be and that it would be a painful revelation for Claire once she found out. Probably a violent one, too. Some of the ‘clues’ dropped by an unknown informer were completely ignored and had they not been, the novel would have been a lot shorter. Some of the characters were created solely to manipulate the readers’ emotions and did little to further the plot (they could have been anyone) – Claire’s kid for one and the judge at the Court Martial for another. Claire’s sister Jackie was the only one who seemed to have any sense apart for her unnatural attachment to the aforementioned whiny brat. Loose ends abound as well (maybe they were tied down in the parts I skipped, but I doubt it). I didn’t really like any of the characters (except maybe for Ray, in a big detective/protector kind of way that I was supposed to) and only kept with it because it was fairly compelling in the sense that I wanted to see if it ended as hip deep in cliché as it began. It did.

Subsequent to this novel, Finder seems to have found his métier – the corporate thriller and while samey, those books are at least a bit more original than this one. He does have a talent for writing devious shenanigans though and witless protagonists who have to try to deal with them. Part of why I read Finder is to laugh at those hapless dopes as they battle the miscreant and find a way to win in the end, despite the overwhelming odds. It’s fun to watch them become suddenly crafty, physically able or (more likely) get rescued. show less

I really like Joseph Finder's writing style, so I enjoyed this one as well. I liked the "fish out of water" aspect of the Harvard Law professor in military court. The daughter was totally unsympathetic, I'm not sure why she was even in the book. Jackie was unnecessarily vague. I liked Grimes and Embry. Quick good legal thriller, but his later books are better.

I thought this was a fairly enjoyable legal thriller in light of the fact that I haven't previously read any of Finder's other novels. A female lawyer's life is turned upside down when her husband is arrested for multiple murders & she discovers that the man she thought she knew well is not the person she thought he was. But is he really guilty of the crimes? While portions of this story were somewhat predictable & it reminded me a lot of A Few Good Men, it was engaging enough to make me want to keep listening & not want to get out of the car. Being the abridged audiobook version, there were some abrupt transitions that I've come to expect with abridgements, but nothing that made it too hard to follow. As far as abridgements go, this show more one was pretty good, although I would've been interested to read an unabridged version to get some more background information. show less

excellent military trial read