November 6, 2005

Legal thrillers, with their tight formats and highly structured procedures, can keep the mind focused. 

James Sheehan observes the conventions and boldly expands them in his assured first novel, THE MAYOR OF LEXINGTON AVENUE (Yorkville, paper, $14.95), which gets the blood up with its story of a mildly retarded young man named Rudy Kelly who’s railroaded into a murder conviction in the tiny Florida backwater of Bass Creek, in 1986.  While the case is initially shocking for what it reveals of small-town injustice and incompetence, it offers ethical salvation 10 years later to a slick Miami lawyer named Jack Tobin, who owes a big debt to Rudy’s dead father. 

Sheehan, a trial lawyer in Tampa, writes with bleak clarity when he’s sharing the dirty tricks of his trade in the harrowing trial scenes, but there’s a touch of the poet in his voice when he turns to Rudy and Bass Creek and the kind of innocence that gets crushed in the infernal coils of the law.

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