Published by Atria Books on October 8, 2024
The male characters in The President’s Lawyer have trouble keeping it in their pants while the female characters have trouble keeping their pants on. Well, the story is set in D.C. and most of the characters are politicians or lawyers, so that’s believable.
The novel is set in a time similar to ours, except D.C. is a state. Two elections ago, Jack Cutler defeated President Smith, who promptly founded a far-right TV network and began a campaign to convince voters that Cutler stole the election. Smith’s network blamed Cutler after a murder was committed by a migrant who Cutler pardoned for a minor drug conviction. Having been Willy Hortoned, Cutler was soundly defeated in the next election.
During his last year in office, Cutler had an affair with Amanda Harper, a White House lawyer who handled subpoenas directed at the Executive Branch. When Amanda’s body is found in a park, Cutler is accused of killing her. The accusation is supported by the presence of his DNA and fingerprints on her clothing. Amanda’s body had rope burns on her wrists, a fact that Cutler attributes to rough but consensual sex. It turns out that Cutler has had rough sex but consensual sex with other women, including his wife Jess.
Cutler wants his old friend Rob Jacobson to defend him. Rob has a rich sexual history of his own, a history that includes shagging Jess before she married Cutler and doing the same with Amanda before she dumped him for Jack. It is foolish for Rob to even consider representing Cutler given his personal connections to the victim, to Cutler, and to Cutler’s wife (who might be a suspect in the murder of his extramarital lover, after all), but the chance to represent a former president in a murder case is too tempting to resist. Besides, Cutler probably pays his legal bills, unlike some former presidents. Cutler’s trial constitutes the bulk of the plot.
Most of the novel’s characterization is devoted to Rob. He was an abused child. Perhaps for that reason, he manifests twitches and facial tics when he’s stressed. He also blames himself for a childhood friend’s drowning when she fell through thin ice. Rob revisits his past when his violent brother (very much an anti-Culter voter) shows up during the trial after making himself unreachable for years. Cutler’s family has a history of mental illness that extends to his own schizophrenic son, who may have had a grudge against Amanda for (in his view) breaking up his parents’ marriage. In the logic of the plot, any of these might be the true killer, assuming that Cutler isn't.
Legal thrillers depend on engaging trials and on characters who teach readers the “inside baseball” of criminal defense. Those are the strengths of Lawrence Robbins’ novel. A reader might quibble that experienced prosecutors would understand the theory that mitochondrial DNA can be recovered from a hair that doesn’t have a follicle, but the prosecutors in the story seem blindsided by a defense expert’s testimony to that effect. A reader might wonder why prosecutors failed to notice that a critical note on a key exhibit was written in a different color ink than the other notes on the same document. Prosecutors blunder on occasion, but these blunders only occurred because they were needed to advance the plot. In most other respects, the story is credible.
The reveal — the killer’s unmasking — brings a final twist to the story. I award points for its surprising nature and deduct nearly the same number of points for its unconvincing nature. Yet Robbins plays fair by planting subtle clues that might predict the ending. Although I was mildly disappointed with the reveal, The President’s Lawyer excels at the best part of any legal thriller: balancing drama and realism when crafting cross-examinations worthy of Perry Mason.
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