Stealing Justice by Larry Axelrood
STEALING JUSTICE by Larry Axelrood is a classic case of an author writing about what he knows.
It’s a fast-paced, page turning legal thriller (some reviewers have already compared it to a John Grisham book) about heroes and villains in the American justice system – and the dangers of it going out of control.
And who better to write about this kind of topic than Axelrood – a longtime judge, prosecutor and criminal defense attorney who uses his insider knowledge in this novel to explore what happens when ambition and greed turn the people who are supposed to uphold the law into criminals themselves.
The story revolves around a scheme by an unscrupulous, powerful lawyer in Chicago who is working with corrupt political forces to “exonerate” prisoners supposedly wrongfully convicted of major crimes – then cashing in on millions of dollars in settlements they recover from the government.
Except the prisoners aren’t really innocent.
And, in return for their release from jail, they pay the crooked lawyers and politicians huge amounts of money from the lawsuits filed against the government for their supposed wrongful imprisonment.
The major heroine is a young woman prosecutor named Marisol Cuellar who is assigned by her bosses to get the charges dropped and conviction overturned of a murder suspect who has spent nine years in prison for the killing of a young girl.
But Cuellar shockingly discovers as she works on the case that the man is indeed guilty of the crime – and then she discovers evidence of the corruption involved at the top levels of her own office and beyond,
Her efforts to expose the plot soon put her career – and her own life – in danger from the perpetrators who are willing to do anything to keep her silent.
A THRILLING RIDE
We find out what a fascinating and tough woman Cuellar really is early in the book when she is attacked by a hit man with a baseball bat while she is walking her dog in a park.
Instead of panicking or trying to run away, she calmly takes out a Glock 9mm she’s carrying, shoots the guy in the leg and then turns him over to police. Cops are astonished by how well she defended herself when they arrive and at the same time they ridicule her inept would-be attacker. “I wish I could have seen your stupid face when she pulled her Glock,” one of them taunt the hapless prisoner. “You brought a baseball bat to a gun fight.”
There are a lot of bad people in this book, but the worst is a powerful lawyer named Paul Baroni who is using the phony exoneration scheme to get rich and believes he is above the law’s ability to stop him.
He is also willing to use any means, including physical violence and murder, to achieve his goal.
You really get to hate Paul Baroni very quickly!
But there is also a poignant story of a man struggling with his conscience to do the right thing: Baroni’s partner in the corrupt law firm who wants to save his family and maybe his own life too before it’s too late. The scenes between him and his devastated wife as they try to navigate their way through this legal nightmare are heartbreaking, but also wonderfully written by Axelrood.
This book moves at breakneck speed through all of these events, with quick short chapters that hardly give you a chance to breathe until the dramatic ending for Marisol Cuellar and all the rest of the compelling characters in STEALING JUSTICE.
It’s a wild ride, with Axelrood using his knowledge and experience to give us an expert view of the American justice system from his long years as a judge, prosecutor and attorney, along with some fascinating legal terminology he drops in at key moments. My favorite insider phrase he uses? “Puke and Plead.” Which means giving up everything you know to authorities in hopes of getting a good plea deal.
The cover blurb for STEALING JUSTICE describes it as a thrilling ride “though a seamy intersection of crime law and politics in Chicago.’
It is all of that.
And much more too…
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