出版社周刊评论
A plethora of generally interesting asides make this lethargically paced mystery an easy, yet ultimately a somewhat frustrating read. As we follow the paralegal days and jazz-piano-playing nights of Ms. Taylor Lockwood, we glimpse the truth behind the dark-wood panels of the venerable law firm Hubbard, White & Willis. Taylor's initial assignment is to retrieve a stolen document that could cost the firm a case and an attractive young litigator his job. The theft proves to be merely a subtext as one ferocious partner pushes for a merger, two older partners firmly oppose it and the rest of the principal players scramble for position while sides are drawn up. Taylor finds coked-up associates with grievances, partners with financial problems, and granddaughters to raise, not to mention call girls. Offices (including her own lowly hole in the wall) are soon bugged, and after an interminable wait, murder makes its entrance. Edgar-nominated Deaver ( Manhattan Is My Beat ) whips up enough atmosphere for a whole series here: late-night music, copious jazz lore, performance-art interludes, man troubles aplenty--the plucky Taylor partakes of them all. She's a likely guide to both the legal and the late-night, but this expansive mystery doesn't have enough narrative gears to shift through. Author tour. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
When a promissory note for $25 million due to a client bank is stolen from hotshot lawyer Mitchell Reece's office in Hubbard, White & Willis, he turns to an unlikely source for detective help--aspiring jazz pianist/paralegal Taylor Lockwood. Taylor is supposed to recover the note in time to prevent the debtor firm from wriggling out of the debt by declaring bankruptcy--and that client bank from pulling its business from the firm. As Taylor gets down to her investigation-- which consists mainly of fighting off the partners' propositions by day and pawing through their offices by night--upstart partner Wendall Clayton plots a merger of Hubbard, White & Willis with a new-money firm--a merger that will throw patrician senior partner Donald Burdick and his supporters to the wolves. The detective plot (torpid theft and, eventually, homicide) and the (far more engrossing) merger plot finally do come together, though not in time for Deaver (Hard News, etc.) to do either one justice.
摘录
CHAPTER ONE The drapery man had been warned that even though it was now well after midnight, Sunday morning of the Thanksgiving holiday, there would very likely be people in the firm here, attorneys and paralegals, still working. And so he carried the weapon at his side, pointed downward. It was a curious thing--not a knife exactly, more of an ice pick, but longer and made of a blackened, tempered metal. He held it with the confidence of someone who was very familiar with the device. And who had used it before. Dressed in gray coveralls bearing the stencil of a bogus drapery cleaning service and wearing a baseball cap, the big, sandy-haired man now paused and, hearing footsteps, slipped into an empty office. Then there was silence. And he continued on, through shadows, pausing for a long moment, frozen like a fox near a ground nest of skittish birds. He consulted the diagram of the firm, turned along one corridor and continued, gripping the handle of the weapon tightly in his hand, which was as muscular as the rest of his body. As he neared the office he sought, he reached up and pulled a paper face mask over his mouth. This was not so that he wouldn't be recognized but because he was concerned that he might lose a fleck of spit that could be retrieved as evidence and used in a DNA match. The office, which belonged to Mitchell Reece, was at the end of the corridor, not far from the front door of the firm. Like all the offices here, the lights were left on, which meant that the drapery man wasn't sure that it was unoccupied. But he glanced in quickly, saw that the room was empty and stepped inside. The office was very cluttered. Books, files, charts, thousands of sheets of papers. Still, the man found the filing cabinet easily--there was only one here with two locks on it--and crouched, pulling on tight latex gloves and extracting his tool kit from his coverall pockets. The drapery man set the weapon nearby and began to work on the locks. Scarf, Mitchell Reece thought, drying his hands in the law firm's marble-and-oak rest room. He'd forgotten his wool scarf. Well, he was surprised he'd managed to remember his coat and briefcase. The lanky thirty-three-year-old associate, having had only four hours' sleep, had arrived at the firm around 8 a.m. yesterday, Saturday, and had worked straight through until about an hour ago, when he'd fallen asleep at his desk. A few moments before, something had startled him out of that sleep. He'd roused himself and decided to head home for a few hours of shut-eye the old-fashioned way--horizontally. He'd grabbed his coat and briefcase and made this brief pit stop. But he wasn't going outside without his scarf--1010 WINS had just reported the temperature was 22 degrees and falling. Reece stepped into the silent corridor. Thinking about a law firm at night. The place was shadowy but not dark, silent yet filled with a white noise of memory and power. A law firm wasn't like other places: banks or corporations or museums or concert halls; it seemed to remain alert even when its occupants were gone. Here, down a wide wallpapered corridor, was a portrait of a man in stern sideburns, a man who left his partnership at the firm to become governor of the state of New York. Here, in a small foyer decorated with fresh flowers, was an exquisite Fragonard oil painting, no alarm protecting it. In the hall beyond, two Keith Harings and a Chagall. Here, in a conference room, were reams of papers containing the magic words required by the law to begin a corporate breach of contract suit for three hundred million dollars, and in a similar room down the hall sat roughly the same amount of paper, assembled in solemn blue binders, which would create a charitable trust to fund private AIDS research. Here, in a locked safe-file room, rested the last will and testament o Excerpted from Mistress of Justice by Jeffery Deaver All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
