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May 22
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In Her Defense
by Stephen Horn
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Reviewed by Len Abram
Stephen Horn's "In Her Defense," as the title proclaims, concerns a
down-and-nearly-out lawyer, Frank O'Connell, defending a woman charged with
murder, the beautiful, patrician Ashley Bronson. In this thriller about a
high profile case, set in Washington, DC, Horn describes how the criminal
justice system works and how good attorneys push legal and ethical limits for
the sake of their clients -- and their own competitiveness. Much of this is
first-rate and convincing. So too are the efforts of the detectives O'Connell
hires to help the defense.
Indeed, Horn's plot leads us down roads with enough twists and turns to make
us question even the obvious guilt of the client. The problem is that the
personal side of the story -- its treatment of character and motivation -- is
full of potholes that make the narrative jarring.
From the start, Horn tells us that O'Connell is facing personal and
professional problems. It would be nice to separate the personal theme in the
novel from the professional, but they intersect and often clash, as they do
with the illustrious client. Ashley Bronson, the legal and love focus for the
attorney, is more mannequin than person. She is some dreamy idea of a rich
beautiful woman, with yachts and horses, culture and pedigree, loyalty and
vulnerability, five-star hotels and cuisine. She is completely ready to risk
her life and liberty on Frank O'Connell's questionable judgment and mental
health.
When he loses confidence in himself, she gives him a pep talk, in language
vacant of originality: "I don't want to hear any more. I believed in you. I
still do. What I really need now is for you to believe in yourself." These
platitudes are all the more ridiculous when we realize her many reasons for
doubts and anxieties. She is charged with first degree murder and faces a
long prison sentence. Her fingerprints are on the gun, and she has threatened
the victim in front of witnesses. She doesn't have an alibi, and her coat has
gunpowder residue on the sleeve. Finally, an ex-CIA eyewitness identifies her
at the scene of the crime -- and she refuses a plea bargain on the advice of
her counsel. Unless she's chewing down Prozac as if they were Tums, her
language and her demeanor do not ring true.
Another characterization that rings false is that of Frank O'Connell himself,
in debt, in therapy and in depression. Although he is charming, witty and
sharp in court, his overall characterization is contrived. It is never clear
why he left his family to live alone in relative squalor and quit his
prestigious law firm in middle age to become a court-appointed lawyer for
clients in a D.C. cellblock. He still loves his wife and certainly his son,
and his father-in-law, Pop Brennan, is even supporting O'Connell's family
while he finds himself. (That journey apparently includes sleeping with his
client.) O'Connell suggests that he is an alcoholic, but few alcoholics can
exert the control over excessive drinking he shows in handling the murder
case under extreme adversity. He has a therapist, but our eavesdropping on
their sessions reveals nothing of substance or substance abuse. The only
plausible explanation for his behavior is -- you guessed it -- post-traumatic
stress, 25 years after Vietnam. It is possible, but unlikely.
More likely is that O'Connell's alienation is entirely for the dramatic
effect of watching him rise from his fall. The troubled lawyer will redeem
himself and his career, along with saving his client. (David Mamet's movie
"The Verdict" is the model and classic for this kind of story.) When O'Connell
has his moment of insight with his father-in-law at the end of the novel, he
slips into the same platitudes of the Ashley Bronson character: "Pop ... It's
not [his former wife's] lot in life to sit around and wait for me to grow up.
She's getting married -- to a pretty decent guy as near as I can tell. What
I've got to do is be as supportive as I can .... I've got a lot of making up to
do." This is psychobabble you might hear on Oprah.
This is not to say that Horn lacks talent. He has plenty. The novelist
catches us off guard refreshingly early in the novel when the defendant
admits her guilt to O'Connell. The mystery of this story, it appears, is not
who done it, but rather how to defend against it. Years after the O.J. trial
gave a bad name to defending those who seem guilty, O'Connell's defense
reminds us how important are the presumption of innocence and the state's
burden to prove guilt. "Alleged" and "accused" are the operative words in our
criminal justice system for a defendant, and the words with which the media
pepper their descriptions of a crime. Along with protecting the media from
lawsuits, this sensitivity protects our rights.
O'Connell mounts a vigorous defense and defends his powerful client against
the much more powerful state. He seems the unlikely candidate to carry this
off and quite literally out of his class because his client and her
adversaries belong to the American aristocracy. Even the victim is an
ex-Secretary of Commerce. But O'Connell proves himself capable and
resourceful again and again. He deflects the legal and verbal assaults of the
judge and prosecutor with intelligence, experience and guts. (This too
undercuts his supposed psychological problems -- he seems fine even under
stress.)
Especially satisfying is that O'Connell hires ex-cops to be his
investigators. With these characters, such as Walter Feinberg, Horn is much
more successful. Through his narrator, Horn even pays homage to the
"scientific method" that informs the
investigative process. This reference
reinforces the view that the writer knows the ideas behind detective fiction.
The unraveling of the case against Ashley Bronson is splendid to watch. It
includes allusions to the 1950s, the Cold War and its nukes, and government
agencies going outside of the law because of an almost diabolical threat. The
1950s loom over the present. At that time, Ashley's father was a nuclear bomb
scientist with leftist sympathies. Henry Bronson's errors brought him to
suicide and caused his daughter to plot revenge on his tormentors, hence the
alleged crime. Horn quotes from Henry Bronson's journal to capture that
period and Bronson's recognition of where he went right and wrong.
With this kind of material, Horn can be effective. To be truly in charge of
his art, to assure that his book does not look like the story line for a
movie script, Horn needs to take another look at his characterizations.
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