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

The Third Victim by Phillip Margolin

Published by St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books on March 6, 2018

A legal thriller should have thrills. The thrills don’t need to involve guns or fists. The best legal thrillers exploit the inherent drama in trials to create tension and suspense. The Third Victim is built on an interesting premise, but it has too little energy to thrill the reader.

The Third Victim starts with the discovery of a woman walking on a road in Oregon. She’s been tortured and, when she’s able to talk, explains that she was held captive and abused by a masked man. She leads the police to the cabin where she was held captive, which happens to be owned by a lawyer named Alex Mason (no relation to Perry). Mason’s DNA is on the duct tape that was used to bind the woman’s hands, so Mason is arrested.

The two key characters are Regina Barrister, Portland’s top criminal defense lawyer, and Robin Lockwood, who Regina recently hired away from a judicial clerkship. Regina seems to be suffering from the early onset of dementia, which is probably supposed to make her sympathetic. Unfortunately, I didn’t know or care enough about Regina to be moved by her dementia. Robin’s mixed martial arts background substitutes for an actual personality. Her fighting prowess nevertheless gives her the opportunity to beat up a client, which is a bit over the top, although it serves to create an interesting conflict of interest.

An abusive cop named Arnold Prater needs Regina’s services when he’s accused of murdering a pimp. The story eventually revolves around Prater and Mason, either or both of whom might be guilty of something, and a couple of women who may or may not be victims.

The most interesting aspect of the novel involves Robin’s role as a newbie lawyer who finds herself playing a key role in a murder trial, given Regina’s apparent dementia. I didn’t quite buy it (the only ethical act would have been to tell Regina she wasn’t capable of defending the case, and then to report her to the bar if she refused to step aside), but I suppose a newbie who just landed a plum job might not be positioned to make the right choice. Still, Regina later fails to recognize an obvious conflict of interest, and if Robin is as smart and capable as she appears to be, the need to intervene to protect a client from that conflict should have been clear to her. Yes, standing up to a prestigious boss is a lot to ask from a new associate, but that’s something that could have been milked for dramatic effect. Like all the other potentially dramatic moments in the novel, it just sort of slides away.

The dialog in The Third Victim is wooden and undifferentiated. Everyone talks like a lawyer, including police detectives who would view it is a sign of dementia if they talked like a lawyer. The characters lack substance and the story lacks pizazz. It moves quickly enough, but it moves like a quick sleepwalker. The plot doesn’t ring true, in part because two characters who seem quite ordinary end up being truly evil, and Phillip Margolin gives the reader no reason to believe that they would engage in the kind of behavior he describes. I liked the concept of a lawyer with dementia, but courtroom drama in The Third Victim is noticeably absent, and what passes for drama outside of the courtroom is unconvincing.

NOT RECOMMENDED