Title: Guilt by Degrees
Author: Marcia Clark
Pages: 438
Publisher: Little, Brown & Co
Rating: Warty!
Marcia Clark is the woman who blew the OJ Simpson murder trial, so what made her think she could write believable novels about a prosecutor is worth finding out, which explains why I picked this up! She tried over twenty cases in her thirteen years but I don't know what her success rate was. She wrote a book about that trial Without a Doubt, which I've read.
This novel is vol 2 of the Rachel Knight series, and as of now, I'm not planning on reading vol 1, so we're coming into this at a possible disadvantage. Fortunately, this series is episodic, so unless there's some hidden story arc which hasn’t yet been made apparent, I figure we’re good to go.
Rachel Knight is an attorney in LA, who is in the Special Prosecutions Unit. Typically in this kind of series, the protagonist is massively overworked, but to her credit, Clark mentions this but doesn’t press it. That's in her favor; unfortunately, the other issue I have with this kind of novel, (when written by a woman; men have their own separate issues) is that it’s somewhat obsessed with describing how wonderful her wardrobe is, and how classily dressed everyone else is. I don’t judge a person by their clothes unless there's some really notable reason to do so, which em ans that I'm not at all impressed with this kind of writing; it simply makes my eyes go glassy. So that's not in her favor!
This is a procedurally styled novel: we follow the attorney all over as she tries to resolve the case, and for me this is somewhat boring with the occasional spike of interest. Rachel has a female detective friend called Bailey who evidently hangs out with her during these investigations, so she can get away with all kinds of things she wouldn’t be able to accomplish on her own.
It would have made the novel much more interesting to me if Bailey and Rachel had been an item. Their relationship would have been far more engrossing had they been dating (and no, I'm not talking about sex, I'm talking about how they get along, how they view life together, and how they display their affection for one another in their everyday interactions, especially since they're of different racial backgrounds, too), but both she and Bailey are decidedly hetero, both attached to men who are way too classy, good looking, and well-dressed for my taste. That's a weakness: the perfect partner, the perfect relationship, the men way, way above the norm. It’s too pat. I get the feeling that Clark is describing something which she badly feels she needs but has failed to find. But that's just me! Again, this is a weakness in the story for me.
So as we start, Rachel is in the courtroom awaiting her case being called and is mildly interested in the pre-trial hearing which is currently being blown by an ill-prepared jerk of an attorney. So when it looks like the case he failed to make is going to be tossed, Rachel steps in and announces that she will re-file it because she feels bad for the victim: a nameless, homeless guy who is about to lose his one and only chance at justice. She doesn't want the suspect to go free. Of course, if she feels so much for the homeless, maybe she ought to dress down a bit and give the cash she saves on her wardrobe to a local homeless shelter, but let us not get into that! Yet! Lol! Right after this, the detective on the case is so pissed at the attorney that he socks the loser in the mouth, so he's put on administrative leave, and Rachel's friend Bailey conveniently gets the case handed to her.
This homeless victim of a stabbing has so far been unidentified, and prior to his death, he was seen grabbing a woman in the street. The suspect was seen on the scene and has a small spot of blood on his sleeve, but he didn’t do it (so we learn). So Rachel and Bailey parade around trying to find video footage and witnesses.
They talk the defending attorney into letting them interview the suspect and they pretty much conclude there that he's innocent, especially as his story checks out the more they look into it. He works at a massage parlor (not that kind!), so they go there to interview some people and they see the cop (who is part of the suspect's defense story) show up for his massage - which he shouldn’t be doing since he's on duty. Since the suspect wouldn’t tell them who this cop was, not wanting to get him into trouble, this is a break for them and further confirms his story. This takes us through the first twenty of the ninety-two (very short) chapters in this novel.
This is a slightly odd story since it starts in first person past, but occasionally breaks into a chapter which is told in third person past. I've decided that I'm no longer going to bother identifying in the details above what the person is that the novel is told in these reviews. What is the point? And especially what is the point when a story is told in more than one person this is, or is told by more than one person as was the last one I reviewed! I don't think that information is important and if it proves to be so, then I’ll raise it in the review.
This mode of telling this story is an oddity to me which doesn’t enamor me of the tale, but this is what we have to work with here. The third-person story is of a woman who works as a dirt-digger. For a large fee, she will unearth secrets from a person's past - a congressman, a CEO, etc., to find something on them which can be used as leverage against them. Presumably this is tied to the main story somehow, but what relevance it has in this story so far is a mystery. The woman, Sabine (yeah, really) has just been handed a new assignment, which is to try and find something on an apparently clean CEO who is resisting a merger. I'm assuming at this point that this new assignment is somehow going to be related to the main story, but it remains to be seen.
Rachel and Bailey interview this cop and they find that everything the suspect told them has checked out, so they realize that they will have to spring him from the jail. This means the case will go belly up since Rachel is already in trouble for taking it on in the first place. Now with no suspect and an unidentified vic, their only remaining hope is to ID the vic. They start canvassing the homeless which eventually leads them to an ostensibly homeless guy who nonetheless lives in a shack and grows vegetables which he evidently trades for other stuff. He knew the vic, but can’t tell them his last name; however, he has a vase which the vic gave to him which conveniently has the guy's full name on the bottom. He's Simon Bayer, who turns out to be the brother of a cop who was murdered. The cop's wife was improbably charged with the ax murder, but she was found not guilty after about a five minute deliberation by the jury. Now Rachel agonizes on how to find her. Well duhh, look her up on the phone book!
It doesn't even remotely cross her mind to do that! She'd much rather describe in detail which expensive restaurants she eats at and what, exactly, she eats, and what, exactly, everyone she meets is wearing. I'm only 25% of the way thru this book and I'm already so sick to death of clothes and food. It’s not looking good!
Bailey drives Rachel out to meet with the attorney who took the cop-ax-murder case, to interview him about it. They learn that the attorney is heavily biased against the accused, but it was a tough case to prosecute. We learn that the cop's wife was good-looking, and had worked in Rachel's own DA's office! She knew enough that she could have planned a murder and worked it so she could get away with it. Or she could be innocent. I have no idea either way at this point. I do suspect that the dead cop was killed to keep him from talking about something, but that's just a guess!
p>Rachel goes out with her boyfriend that evening, and it’s more fine food, fine clothes and jazz. Barf. Why is it always jazz in these novels? What a tedious trope! Would it kill them to have someone who's into heavy metal, or classical, or pop-rock? So they go back to Rachel's place and she's thinking maybe it’s time, maybe she's now "ready"; maybe now she feels able to drop her briefs and file a motion for some heavy voir dire, leading the witness without objection, but her boyfriend, Graden wants to talk about Rachel's dead sister, Romy (I guess her best friend was Michelle. Trope time! Tedious back story alert!
And this one came right out of Poppy Montgomery's back story as Carrie Wells in Unforgettable. Yes, Poppy. Respect the Poppy! She's Australian so we can pretty much forgive her anything. In Unforgettable she played a character with an eidetic memory, whose sister was abducted when she was quite young. It was one of those stories where the arc never is going anywhere, just like Beckett's pointless arc in Castle, which isn’t going anywhere, either.
In almost the same breath that Clark tells us that Rachel had an "impulsive and reckless nature", she also tries to make us believe that Rachel was "a typical young girl". Not buying that; typical young girls tend not to be out-and-out impulsive and reckless - not that they don't have the occasional reckless impulse, of course, but young girls tend to be a bit smarter than young boys and to stay out of brain-dead trouble more easily. Although not always.... But anyway, Romy was abducted by a guy in a cowboy hat twenty years before. There's no word on whether he was wearing cashmere or silk, or whether he preferred country over jazz and whether he drunk Ketel One Martinis. Rachel witnessed it, but failed to note his description or the truck license plate and now has humongous survivor guilt.
Rachel reacts violently to Graden's digging into her past without her permission! Way to manufacture a crisis, Clark! So Graden gets down-graded by Rachel and he leaves. It looks like it's over at this point between them. Seriously? Can we be any more melodramatic? And we're not even quite halfway through this story. The next day gets them nowhere with the case except for one video of an arm with a wrist sporting an interesting watch, leading to a hand which thrusts a knife into the vic.
At the end of the day "Rache" has to meet with her two best friends, Bailey and Toni (Toni LaCollette? Seriously?!) in a bar to tell them what happened with Graden. But she fails to tell them the truth. They don’t know about Romy (or Michelle), so she blames the break up on Graden being a control freak. I find it amusing that Toni calls her Rache, the word written in blood on the wall in Arthur Conan Doyle's very first Sherlock Holmes story, written in 1886: A Study in Scarlett.
I don’t know how 'Rache' is supposed to be pronounced! Is it 'rash' - perhaps a reference to her "impulsive and reckless nature"? Is it supposed to be understood to be "Raitch" - like Rachel without the hell? And what's with her friends' names? A surname for a first name and an ambiguously masculine name? No word on Bailey and Toni's naming rationale yet. Yeah, I know, I'm getting bitchy, but honestly? I wouldn't be like this if the story was engaging me more powerfully!
So Bailey and Rache interview the IO on the Zach Bayer murder, and they come away thinking it even less likely that Lilah murdered her husband. Next they interview both Zach's and Lilah's parents. So at this point, around chapter 40, it's looking wide open. Several possibilities have gone through my mind: Lilah did it, but I don't think she did. There is a prologue which evidently describes the murder, and which I did not read, as usual, but I caught a part of it in reading something else, and it seems like the person who did this was too strong to be Lilah.
Another possibility is that Lilah hired someone to do it, but that still doesn't get it done for me. My favorite right now, until and unless I learn something new here, is that Simon Bayer murdered his own brother because he fell in love with Lilah, and either she encouraged him, misleading him on as it were and then ditching him after the dirty deed was done, knowing he couldn't do a thing about it, or he simply did it without a word to her, and she was so disgusted with how he'd done it that she would have nothing to do with him afterwards. But that wouldn't explain why she didn't turn him in.
One vague suspicion I had, that Sabine is Lilah, has now been confirmed. I still don't know what she's up to, but she engineered a brief meeting with Graden in a bar. He was uninterested in her (to his credit!), but she couldn't resist dropping a not so subtle hint that she knows who he is and who he was dating. So she has something going on with regard to Rachel, and we learn that she has destroyed one woman's reputation - a woman who upset her in high school, waiting years to get revenge. Is she now going after Rachel for some slight slight long ago? Sabine/Lilah has an associate called Chase (c'mon with the names already!) Does Chase live in Manhattan?! Chase could, conceivably at this point, be the guy who stabbed Simon Bayer, but I have no leaning one way or the other on that question at this point.
Rachel goes to yet another expensive meal in yet another expensive restaurant (how the hell she affords this given her frequent complaints about her low pay is another unsolved mystery!) and happens to run into Daniel, her boyfriend from the previous novel, with whom she broke up because he was gone so often pursuing one or another of his duties. This is another kink in Rachel's character as drawn by Clark, who on the one hand paints her as this tough, independent person who doesn't need to be validated by a guy, but who then who turns right around and dumps her boyfriend (with whom she is still, even now, in love evidently) because she feels abandoned when he's out of town so much!
We hear a rumor or two here and there that someone higher up in Rachel's organization is gunning for her, but this never seems to precipitate, and other than a word or two here and there about what an evil schemer this loser is, nothing happens - or at least it hasn’t 86% of the way through this, so maybe Clark is trying to build this to come to fruition in vol 3 - which I don’t plan on reading having suffered through vol 2!
The investigation continues apace. A slow pace. A very slow pace. For me, this is way too much procedure. It’s boring as hell. The only thing which is keeping me going is the mystery and it's taking awfully long to get there, which is why I keep making up solutions of my own, most of which are wrong as it happens! Clark mentions Lizzie Borden twice. The first time she does it to reveal that she knows what a lot of people do not about Borden, which is that she was found not guilty of the brutal murder of her parents. The second mention is Clark showing us that she thinks Borden was guilty. I’d have to disagree with her on that, but that's another story, since Borden gets a mention in my Timeless.
We get endless more description of what they're eating, and what they're drinking, and what they're wearing. From what I've read, this is worse in the first novel, but I find that hard to believe! I do believe that Clark is obsessed with Glenlivet and Ketel One.
Rachel is attacked one evening when she goes to her room. Apparently this is Lilah's idea, but she didn't order the attack, only that someone find out how much Rachel knows. The attack was unauthorized, and left Rachel battered and bruised, and with her assailant in possession of the photo of the watch on the wrist attached to the hand of the person who stabbed Simon Bayer. So now they know to dispose of the watch. But that's all they know. How this would even remotely constitute discovering how much Rachel knows is another mystery in this book of too many mysteries. But Rachel now has a security detail following her around.
Rachel and Bailey drive around endlessly, in a rather haphazard pattern, tediously teasing tiny clues. It looks more and more like Lilah did kill her husband, and (to her) for good reason: he was as much a psychopath as she was, and he had evidently blackmailed her into marrying him. Given what we’ve been told about Lilah, I simply don’t buy this at all; this behavior they're currently considering seems way out of character for her. So how was Zach blackmailing her? Evidently - actually, not evidently, since there's no actual evidence that this is what happened - Lilah had killed a homeless guy in a hit and run (or a hit and not run - we don’t know yet!).
Zach had apparently helped her to cover it up, but he had retained the evidence of her guilt, and blackmailed her into marrying him on pain of revealing that evidence and destroying her career. This is all supposition on Rachel's part at this point, but Clark has already ruined her own plot here because she has already told us that Lilah's career was ruined anyway after Zach died and she was tried for it. Of course, this didn’t impinge on Zach before he died, but it had to have crossed Lilah's transom as she planned this - if she planned this.
Like I said, I don't buy that Lilah would tolerate this blackmail given her character, OTOH, given her slow-burn revenge on the girl in school, I have to consider that it’s >possible she might have done it this way (put up with it for a while until she plotted revenge), but I find it honestly too hard to believe. I'm wondering now if Clark is trying to set us up here for a big twist at the end.
Rachel and Bailey interview Zach's parents, and later the discover the hit and run, and figure out a motive which kinda explains everything that happened: if Simon Bayer had discovered that Zach was blackmailing Lilah and this was why Lilah (supposedly) killed Zach, and if Simon had the evidence, or surmised that such evidence existed, then he could have flushed Lilah out, and she could have used that opportunity to have him killed.
Lilah sends Rachel a bottle of Glenlivet, and with it is a picture of Rachel and Daniel from that night at the restaurant - the very night when Rachel had a feeling that someone was watching, her but could see no one suspicious, not even a person snapping photographs of her, and neither could Rachel's hot-shot security detail. Some detail. Neither does Rachel tell her security detail about this. Or at least she hasn’t as far as I've read.
Just when I thought Clark was going to pick up the story, it dissolved into a mess. In order to try and flush out Lilah, Rachel and Bailey start organizing some very visible searches of various properties. They start with Simon and Zach's parent's home, and then an apartment in which Simon lived. They search a storage space which Simon used and from a flimsy reference found in a brochure there, they track down a cheap housing place where Simon may have stayed, only to discover that a person living there had an association with the hit and run kid. That woman was storing the evidence which Zach had withheld from the hit and run, although how Simon knew about this remains a complete mystery.
Another complete mystery is why we suddenly get random info tossed at us that Lilah was pregnant and that Zach was trying to 'force her' to get pregnant! Where that came from and why is, again, another mystery. It's supposed to go to motive for Lilah finally deciding to kill off Zach. I'm sorry but I don’t buy any of this at all. It’s too random, too loose and makes no sense given Lilah's character traits that have been shared with us. Don't worry, though. It gets worse.
As they're leaving with that evidence, Rachel and Bailey spot a woman talking with the home's supervisor, but not a single thing gets triggered in either of their minds. These are two people, one of whom is a cop, the other a suspicious-minded DA, who know, they're being stalked, and who are actively looking for a young woman and yet not even the merest suspicion crosses their mind that this might be Lilah or someone she has hired to tail them! Not once, Not even a little bit. Not even remotely.
Consequently, they get into their car and they're attacked and shot up by a guy in another car, resulting in the death of the one remaining body guard (the other has gone off to lunch!), and the cheap shot of Clark pretending for a few sentences that Bailey is dead!
I'm sorry but I checked out right here and skimmed the last half-dozen pages which consisted of the asinine scam of having Rachel offer herself as a target to try and lure in the stalker guy! She walks the streets alone in the dark with no visible body guard, and no body armor, and the stalker falls for it, and is shot by Bailey who is not following Rachel, but hiding at her destination in the blind faith hope that her stalker won’t attack her until she reaches it! Seriously? So the Chase is over, but they don’t even catch Lilah. She gets away, and of course, as if this isn't pathetic enough, Rachel gets back with Graden on the last page. This is after she has blindly drunk the scotch which Lilah sent her, and without even wondering for a fleeting moment if it was poisoned.
Why wasn't this book offered with a barf bag? It started with some potential, but no matter how many chances I gave her to pull the chestnuts out, Clark kept on blithely adding more chestnuts. So I'm glad I missed vol 1, and I’ll be even more glad to miss vols 3 through however many she can get away with after this. Now it’s time to get Rampant!
