Casey Jordan is a successful Texas criminal defense attorney who likes to take on the kinds of cases that grab headlines and CNN interviews. Her ambition is stoked when she gets an opportunity to represent her former law professor in a capital murder case. Eric Lipton has been accused of the mutilation death of a young law student with whom he was sexually involved. Although the evidence points to his guilt, Casey is confident that she can get him off and certain that he is innocent. It's a promising setup for a legal thriller, but a seemingly unrelated murder in the novel's opening pages will nag at readers. By the time the relationship between the two crimes is teased out, the solution to the first crime seems like an anticlimax.
Lipton is a truly evil man. Casey is not particularly likable either: her hardscrabble background has propelled her into a sterile, loveless marriage to a wealthy man, and her childhood dream of defending indigent clients now seems like a remnant of youthful idealism. The novel's more interesting figures are Donald Sales, the law student's father, a traumatized Vietnam veteran whose grief and rage fuels the narrative, and Bob Bolinger, an Austin cop who believes that Lipton is a serial killer responsible for other, similar crimes across the country. Like Lipton's pathology, which is unveiled long after his guilt is proven to the reader's (if not the jury's) satisfaction, Casey's change of heart--about her client, her husband, and her ideals--is late and lukewarm. Before it occurs, Tim Green has a chance to showcase his heroine's courtroom skills and illustrate why she's among the fastest legal guns in the Lone Star state. A workmanlike addition to a popular genre, Letter of the Law won't keep you up at night, but it's a satisfying hammock read on an Indian summer afternoon.