'The Best Defense'
by Ellis Cose
HarperCollins, $24
John Wisocki, a despondent manager about to be laid off by a computer company, gets a gun, writes a suicide note and plans to take his own life in the office of his subordinate - a worker being promoted over him.
Unfortunately, the subordinate suddenly appears, a struggle ensues and the subordinate - not Wisocki - ends up dead.
An awful situation, but it's even worse: The subordinate, Francisco Garcia, is Hispanic, and the suicide note written by Wisocki, who is white, complains bitterly that Garcia's promotion was due to his race and to their company's misguided affirmative-action policies.
It is a tragedy fraught with meaning in our contentious times: Is this a terrible accident by a helpless victim of corporate downsizing - or cold-blooded murder by an embittered racist?
So begins "The Best Defense" (HarperCollins, $24), a thought-provoking new courtroom thriller by Newsweek contributing editor Ellis Cose. It is a novel with special resonance in Washington state, where the November ballot will include Initiative 200, a referendum designed to overturn many affirmative-action measures.
In Cose's tightly constructed plot, the Hispanic prosecutor, Mario Santiago, sees it as a simple case of racially motivated homicide. Wisocki is charged with murder, though he claims Garcia's death was accidental.
Squaring off against Santiago is his old flame and former colleague in the prosecutor's office, Felicia Fontaine. A rising star of the criminal-defense bar, Fontaine views Wisocki as nothing more than an innocent victim of misguided affirmative-action policies who has been charged with a crime he did not commit.
Unfortunately for Fontaine, the case is singled out for heavy-handed attention by self-appointed civil-rights leaders who castigate, threaten, even attempt to seduce Fontaine - who happens to be black - for "selling out" by representing a racist. Even Santiago is treated less as an individual and more like a symbol by his own Hispanic community, which rallies to support the prosecution.
While prosecutor and defense lawyer struggle to stay focused on the case, the media and various interest groups swirl around them, chanting in protest or delivering harsh judgments on the two attorneys' efforts.
Cose has set his sights higher than simply adding yet another title to the rapidly mounting heap of courtroom thrillers churned out by Grisham, Turow, Martini & Co. The author of several nonfiction works on race relations ("The Rage of a Privileged Class," "Color-Blind"), he said in a telephone conversation that his intent in switching to fiction was partly to "have fun" - but also to reach a new and different audience as he continues to explore "the intersection of politics, race and law."
Despite its thriller trappings, this is a formidable first novel. It is crisp, fast-paced and engaging. Best of all, in a genre glutted with lightweight fare, "The Best Defense" reaches higher to explore more complex and important issues.
It does, however, suffer some annoying cliches. Opposing lawyers who are former lovers abound in print, though they are rarely found in the flesh, and the sex scenes scattered throughout this relatively short novel seem perfunctory, unnecessary and are plainly written from a male perspective. In addition, the obligatory plot twist in the epilogue is not terribly surprising.
Yet those issues are minor. At the close of the novel, the reader is left with unsettling questions that may challenge long-held assumptions about some of the most sensitive issues of our time: race relations, affirmative action, diversity, corporate responsibility - and especially the quality of justice, as expressed in American society and its legal system.
