Here's the verdict: the legal thriller has become boring and predictable, and the reading public is sentenced to a slew of dull courtroom epics with loose storylines and weighty judicial jargon. The evidence is right there on the shelves of departure lounge bookstores, which are littered with legal blockbusters by an endless stream of attorneys-turned-authors, and the finger of blame can be pointed squarely at senior partners such as Turow, Lashner and Grisham, who stand accused of devaluing the genre with their increasingly uninspired output. Brain Storm could be classed as a legal thriller, in that it features an idealistic young lawyer (don't they all) who is caught in an unwanted criminal case which threatens his career, his marriage and his very life. But that's just the bare bones of a rich, entertaining, amusing and thought-provoking novel which explores such hot topics as freedom of speech, neuroscience, the deterioration of the US legal system, and the creeping influence of political correctness.
Set in St Louis, Missouri, in the year 2002, the book crackles with tooled-up literary energy, and though nothing much happens in the way of shooting, car-chases or explosions, Dooling's words leap exuberantly off the page like computer-generated jumping beans.
Joe Watson is a Webhead attorney, an expert in searching the Net for legal precedents and anything else you want to know about case law. He works for a top corporate firm, earning big money just for trawling the Web on behalf of the firm's powerful clients. He has never been inside a courtroom, except for the one time when he was sworn in as a lawyer, and spends his day in front of a high-resolution VDU, researching copyright infringements and other dull but remunerative tasks.
His happy web-surfing days are abruptly ended when Judge Stang, the most feared figure in the judiciary, assigns Watson to defend a man accused of committing a "hate crime" which, under a new statute in federal law, carries an automatic death penalty. The defendant, Jimmy Whitlow, is accused of murdering a deaf black man, or, more correctly, a "specially-abled person of color", but all is not what it seems. Unable to ditch the case, and unwilling to plead his new client to a lesser charge of life imprisonment, Watson finds himself caught in a downward spiral in which he loses his lucrative job, is deserted by his wife and children, and is seduced by a brilliant, sexy and predatory neuroscientist.
What drives the story along like a wired-up Web engine is Dooling's smart, satirical eye for the foibles of modern America, and its attitudes to race and religion, crime and punishment, free speech and freedom of opinion. Brain Storm posits a world where political correctness has taken precedence over plain speaking, and the human soul has been superceded by the cold, clinical cult of neuroscience. The writing is always sharp, witty and thought-provoking, while the narrative is never cliched or cumbersome.
Computer-illiterate readers might find some of the techie-talk a tad unfathomable, but behind all Dooling's web-speak and scientific terminology lies a mischievous, clever sense of humour which you won't find in the verbose cyber-prose of Michael Crichton.
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