Christopher A. Darden

Books written by celebrities seem to be on every shelf of the bookstore lately. Just about all the members of the original Star Trek cast have their names on the cover of a science fiction novel, whether they actually wrote them or not. Hillary Clinton has signed an $8 million contract with Simon & Schuster for her story, with a history as a best-selling author already behind her. And Christopher Darden, erstwhile prosecutor of O.J. Simpson, has apparently decided that writing courtroom mysteries is just the thing for his post-legal career.

Fortunately, Darden had the good sense to team up with a strong journeyman mystery writer: Dick Lochte, author of the Leo Bloodworth novels, Sleeping Dog and Laughing Dog, and the Terry Manion novels, Blue Bayou and The Neon Smile, each one of them better than the one before. And the team-up works, sort of; despite the fact that the mystery itself can be guessed by the veteran mystery reader in the first 50 pages, despite the fact that the writing is often execrable, this book keeps one turning the pages.

Nikki Hill is an attorney with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, making her second appearance in a Darden/Lochte novel (the first was The Trials of Nikki Hill). This time around, she is assigned to assist a more senior, and duller, attorney in prosecuting Randy Bingham, a rich young wastrel with poetic aspirations who is accused of killing his girlfriend. Her boyfriend is homicide detective Virgil Sykes, a man determined to clear his partner of charges that he murdered a young woman. Both of them befriend Adam, the young son of the girlfriend Bingham is supposed to have killed, and Adam becomes deeply enmeshed in both of the cases occupying his new friends.

The trial dialogue is competently written, if unexciting; this isn’t a mystery that has its heart in the courtroom. It is therefore all the more disappointing that the dialogue concerning the politics in the district attorney’s office is so sinister it’s often laughable (“’Right,’ Dana said sarcastically, jerking the door open. ‘Remember, my enemy’s friend is my enemy’”), and that the sex scenes sound as if they belong in a romance novel (“A tremor of excitement electrified her body”). The bad guys sound as if they walked into the novel from Central Casting (“’He’s never offed a bitch,’ Jay Jay added. ‘He just, you know, messes ‘em up a little’”), as does the sexist police officer (“’Oh, mama!’ McNeil exclaimed, checking out the corpse. ‘This is my favorite kind of lady. No sass. Low maintenance’”). Overall, the writing sometimes sounds like the authors are participating in the Bulwer-Lytton contest (“His beloved’s lifeless flesh had not yet cooled, but he was beginning to worry about his own wretched hide”).

Why, then, does this book hold the reader’s interest? It would be easy to say simply that the pace is fast, turning this into the sort of popcorn reading that’s just right for a quiet winter weekend when the reader wants only to be entertained, not to think. But what really does it is that the three main characters are so well-drawn that one wants to keep reading just to find out what happens to them. Nikki would be fun to have a good gossip about men with, to talk to about what it’s like to be a professional woman who loves her work but wants a family, to dish the dirt on office politics. Virgil works hard, thinks hard, and loves hard. Adam sounds like a fascinating kid, a ten-year-old millionaire who is a genius with electronics. These characters have a complexity that the lesser characters in the novel belie, a life to them that makes them real. Together, they make reading this novel feel like a handful of hours spent with new friends.

Originally published in The Drood Review of Mystery, Volume 21, No. 1 (Jan/Feb 2001) at 5-6.… (more)