By Rich Nicholls
Fiction
The Final Judgment
By Richard North Patterson. Knopf. 435 pp. $25.
A Few writers in the crowded field of legal thrillers are as skilled as Richard North Patterson at depicting the ebb and flow of a murder trial, the fierce battles over evidence, the struggles of the defense and prosecuting attorneys to seize on even the smallest uncertainties in a witness and turn them into a weapon. His novels (including "Degree of Guilt" and "Eyes of a Child") have also been distinguished by his complex portraits of his protagonists, and "The Final Judgment" is no exception.
Caroline Masters, who has just been appointed to the Court of Appeals by the President, is summoned home to New Hampshire to defend her niece, arrested for the particularly grisly murder of her lover. Caroline, who had broken with her family some 20 years ago, finds the carefully compartmentalized existence she has built coming apart as her efforts to clear her niece threaten to reveal a series of family secrets long suppressed. The courtroom scenes are vivid, tense and convincing.
Caroline is no simple heroine: increasingly desperate to identify the real killer, she steps outside the law to secure evidence. And the resolution of the case surprises with quiet conviction. This somber novel is both an ingenious mystery and a moving exploration of the ways in which silence and fear can destroy a family.
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Slow Fuse
By Masako Togawa. Pantheon. 195 pp. $22.
A Dr. Uemura, the young psychiatrist at the heart of this shrewd, subtle mystery, has two pressing problems. The first is a patient, a college student who insists that he has shot and killed a woman. The second problem is the woman, who is very much alive. She is beautiful, alternately icily distant and aggressively seductive, and Uemura swiftly finds himself in love with her. She is also clearly terrified, and to help his patient and win the woman's affection Uemura keeps probing the puzzle. His well-intentioned efforts lead him deeper and deeper into a seamy tangle of sex, blackmail and murder.
Ms. Togawa is the author of 20 previous novels (three have been translated into English), and her experience is evident: the characters (including a young woman with a taste for drugs and orgies, a university professor desperate to keep a particularly nasty secret, and a pilot whose flirtations with suicide may cloak a lethal plot) are deftly sketched in, and the setting (the trendier precincts of modern Tokyo) is rendered with a quietly unsettling air of menace. Uemura -- decent, determined to help -- makes a nicely ironic protagonist, for his baffled efforts to understand set in motion a violent series of events. Ms. Togawa has been described as "the P.D. James of Japan." In fact, her interest in the wilder precincts of sex and in the ways with which we stubbornly pursue disaster make her work more reminiscent of the fiction of Ruth Rendell. This is a disturbing and tough-minded book.
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