Grif Stockley
Blind Judgment
As he wrestles with an angry judge, a helpless client, a terrifyingly proficient prosecutor and the emotional turmoil of his own history, Gideon Page faces his toughest case yet in Blind Judgment. The result is a riveting read rich in vivid characters, local color and an explicit insider's view of the life-and-death battle that is a capital murder trial. (Simon and Schuster, 1997)
Excerpt from Blind JudgmentI stop at a convenience store in Moro to use the bathroom. Middle age. If this is a precursor to what's ahead, I can't get too excited about it. Is it my imagination or do I really have to piss fifteen times a day? How do guys who work in factories cope with one fifteen-minute break in the morning? As I read the copy on the white condom boxes above the urinal, I realize I would need a catheter and a bottle the size of a water cooler strapped to my leg to hold a job in a plant.
Praise for Blind JudgmentThere's nothing slick about Stockley's books featuring Arkansas lawyer Gideon Page, and that's a large part of their attraction. Told in the first-person present tense, the books take a pragmatic, no-nonsense attitude toward the work of being a lawyer. Stockley's latest has Page, a former social worker, commuting from Little Rcok to his hometown of Bear Creek in the Arkansas Delta to defend an African American, Doss Bledsoe, accused of his killing his Chinese-American employer,Willie Ting-presumably on the orders of a wealthy white man named Paul Taylor, whose offer to buy Ting's meat-packing plant was refused. . . . Page at first fumbles his client's defense. And even his eventual success comes through hard work and luck rather than courtroom theatrics--another reason to like this quietly effective story. -- Publishers Weekly Starred Review |
|
