A Gambler's Jury
Author: Victor Methos
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Date of Publication: February 27, 2018
Pages: 336
A Gambler's Jury is one of six novels nominated for the 2019 Best Mystery Novel Edgar Award. The other five are: The Liar's Girl by Catherine Ryan Howard, House Witness by Mike Lawson, Down to the River Unto the Sea by Walter Mosley , Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne, and A Treacherous Curse by Deanna Raybourne. This is the fourth of the six which I have reviewed so far.
You've got to love a book which starts out with the sentence: "It was all fun and games until I showed up to court so hungover that my head felt like it was going to explode." Such is the life for Salt Lake City defense attorney Dani Rollins. Alone and adrift in a life full of booze and bad decisions, Dani gets a new client. A couple brings in their adopted 17 year old son who is mentally challenged. He has been arrested in the company of some other (non-mentally challenged) teens from his high school and charged with distribution of drugs. Dani assumes the kid has been used by the other teens, although the police see it otherwise. Things don't add up when her client is charged as an adult and faces a potentially long jail sentence. In between brooding over her ex-husband's new wife an the son she has lost custody of, Dani begins an investigation which circuitously leads in a myriad of directions.
The setting is Salt Lake City and its surrounding counties. This is a nice change from the usual Los Angeles or New York locales for mystery novels. The author, a seasoned criminal-defense and civil-rights lawyer himself, deftly describes the peculiarities of the justice system in Utah. The characters are all very human and very believable, although you want to smack Dani any number of times as she unleashes her temper and sarcasm in the courtroom. Despite her faults, Dani has her client's best interests at heart. The parents inexplicably abandon their handicapped son when he turns 18 and Dani takes him in until she can secure proper placement. She works diligently to defend her client against odds which are stacked very high against him for reasons that initially are unclear.
The ending has a neat twist of plot which was actually fairly predictable almost from the outset. In retrospect, there were key clues in the early chapter describing Dani's initial consultation with this family. I enjoyed A Gambler's Jury and found it to be a very worthy nominee for the 2019 Edgar for best mystery novel. I will look forward to reading other books by this author.
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