Betrayal by Phillip Margolin

Published by Minotaur Books on November 7, 2023

Betrayal is a legal thriller minus the thrills. Phillip Margolin goes through the motions of plot development in a story that features a lawyer, but the plot is weak, trial drama is negligible, and the lawyer’s competence is questionable.

Robin Lockwood found time to train for MMA bouts when she was in law school. It’s impossible to do two full-time endeavors and expect to do either of them well, so it isn’t surprising that Lockwood got the snot pounded out of her when she was asked to fight a superior opponent as a replacement for a fighter who dropped out. Lockwood quit the fighting game and became a criminal defense lawyer. Unfortunately, her skills as a courtroom fighter are as weak as her cage fighting skills.

Years later, Lockwood’s MMA opponent, Mandy Kerrigan, is on a downhill slide. She’s arrested for multiple murders related to a young man who sold her performance enhancing drugs that turned out not to be as undetectable as she was promised. She was suspended from fighting because of her positive drug test. The killer invaded the drug dealer’s home and not only took out her dealer but also the dealer’s sister and parents. Naturally, Kerrigan wants Lockwood to defend her.

The case against Kerrigan is ridiculously weak. Someone saw her knocking on the front door of the house where the victims were killed, but nobody saw her enter or exit the home. The killer entered through the back door, not the front, making the presence of anyone on the front porch less than compelling evidence. Kerrigan’s DNA isn’t found inside the home. None of the victims’ blood is on her clothing. The police don’t have a murder weapon. Kerrigan might have had a weak motive to kill the kid who sold her the PEDs that caused her suspension, but she has no motive to kill the other family members. Lockwood acts as if the case is formidable, but in the real world it probably wouldn’t have been charged.

Other crimes contribute to the plot. A mobster is operating a scheme to defraud insurance companies by staging accidents, sending the alleged injury victim to a crooked doctor, and using a crooked lawyer to settle with a crooked claims adjuster. When the scheme causes a driver’s death, the mobster threatens to murder the fake injury victim and the lawyer, while the husband of the dead driver decides to murder the mobster. This seems like a lot of unlikely killing over an insurance scam, but the various threats and deaths are arguably relevant to Kerrigan’s trial. Since Lockwood is looking into the mobster, she is at risk of being yet another victim. Fortunately she knows how to punch people, at least if she’s in a cage.

The sister of the PED seller had bullied a high school girl. That girl killed herself, creating the unlikely possibility that the suicide victim’s parents murdered the bully and her entire family for revenge. The dead father in the family owed gambling debts, while the heir to the family’s estate is a felon who was recently released from prison. Alternative suspects thus abound, further weakening the dubious case against Kerrigan.

Margolin often tells the reader that death penalty trials require enormous preparation, but we rarely see Lockwood doing much of anything. She interviews a few witnesses and assigns an associate to review discovery that she should be reading herself. We learn more about the outfits she wears than the actual work she does to prepare for trial.

Lockwood is trying to get past the dramatic death of her fiancé three years earlier. To that end, she has been chastely dating (more like jogging with) the prosecutor who, predictably enough, is assigned to prosecute Kerrigan. They meet to resolve the conflict while establishing that they are both true professionals and caring humans who put ethics above all else. In other words, they’re pretty dull, although they make a predictable decision to shag at the first opportunity.

Legal thrillers generally succeed or fail based on the drama of trial scenes. In Betrayal, trial scenes are cursory. They also lack energy. It shouldn’t be possible to suck the drama out of a murder trial, but Margolin manages to do it. Lockwood also manages to overlook an obvious bit of evidence against her client, calling into question her ability as a defense attorney. Maybe she was concussed too often when she was fighting in MMA matches.

Legal thrillers also benefit from discussions of the Inside Baseball of trials. Margolin gives the reader some procedural information that everyone knows but ignores the strategy and tactics that make trials so fascinating. In short, while Margolin offers the skeleton of a story that might have been interesting, he adds insufficient flesh to bring the story alive. I would only recommend the novel to die-hard fans of legal thrillers who need something to read while awaiting another novel by Turow or Lescroart.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS