Published
by Touchstone Books, 22 March 2005. ISBN: 978-0-74327008-3 (HB)
Springfield, Illinois, is famous in U.S. history.
Abraham Lincoln moved to the city in 1837 and set up in various legal
practices, was elected to the state legislature and to Congress, and was
finally, in 1860, elected U.S. President. Springfield is, or should be,
synonymous with all that is best in the U.S. political and justice systems.
In this story, Hugh Freyl is another
respected Springfield lawyer, specialising in corporate law in a major firm
bearing the name of one of Lincoln’s partners. Twenty-five years ago he was
struck blind; devastating though this was,he not only returned to his practice
but became involved in the Illinois State Literacy in Prisons programme. One of
the young offenders whom he encounters is fifteen-year-old David Marion who is
serving a life sentence for the murder of his foster-father and foster-brother.
David is functionally illiterate, an ‘urban savage’, product of a totally
dysfunctional background and even further brutalised by his experiences in a
notorious adult prison to which, as a juvenile, he ought not to have been sent.
Freyl recognises David’s intelligence and not only undertakes his education but
works, with eventual success, to have him freed. Then one night, in the library
at his law firm, Hugh Freyl is battered to death.
David Marion, with his cold and hostile
personality and his reputation for extreme violence, is the most obvious,
indeed, the only suspect. He is arrested, held for four days and then, having
established an unimpeachable alibi, released without charge. But even so . . .
with his history. . . ? It is in his
interests to find out who did murder Hugh Freyl and with the aid of Stephanie
Willis, Hugh’s former personal assistant and mistress, he sets out to do so.
The story of his quest forms one of the narrative strands of this book, while
the other, told as if from beyond the grave by Hugh himself, is the story of
Hugh’s relationship with David and of the events in David’s life that have made
him what he is. It is a measure of Brady’s brilliance as a writer that she does
not yield to the temptation to make David likeable, let alone loveable. He is
the complete reverse: cold, rejecting, possibly psychotic, subject to blackouts
so that even he cannot be sure that he did not after all murder Hugh Freyl. We
feel an abstract pity for him, and anger and disgust at Brady’s portrayal of a
criminal justice system that veers from the lackadaisical and slipshod to the
downright abusive and corrupt, and of a prison system that is unbelievably
brutal and degrading. And as the story continues and David and Stephanie begin
to uncover a complex web of corporate greed and fraud and political corruption
and criminality, David does become more human. But his enemies are closing in
on him and those whom he loves.
This is Brady’s first crime novel. It is
extremely powerful and blazes with deep-felt anger at the abuses she describes.
Her choice of Springfield, with its association with Lincoln, as a location is
obviously deliberate: the contrast between what the justice and political
systems are and what they should be is clear. Although the story is set in the
U.S.A., Brady now lives in England. She has written a compelling and
well-structured book: an excellent read on anybody’s terms. ------- Reviewer: Radmila May Joan Brady is the author of short stories, articles,
reviews. Her latest book Bleedout marks a change in direction; it is a
thriller that has been brought out simultaneously in the US and the UK. Foreign
editions so far include Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, the Netherlands and
Poland. She lives in Oxford.
Radmila May was
born in the U.S. but has lived in the U.K. since she was seven apart from seven
years in The Hague. She read law at university but did not go into practice.
Instead she worked for many years for a firm of law publishers and still does occasional
work for them including taking part in a substantial revision and updating of
her late husband’s legal practitioners’ work on Criminal Evidence published
late 2015. She has also contributed short stories with a distinctly criminal
flavour to two of the Oxford Stories anthologies published by Oxpens Press.
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