Cold Truth
Joel Goldman
(Reviewer - Narayan Radhakrishnan)
2004 Pinnacle Books
ISBN: 0786014490

Syndicated radio psychiatrist Dr. Gina Davenport is brutallay murdered. The quick arrest of a young patient, & her confession, puts Lou Mason in the murderer's sights.

Sr. Associate Reviewer Narayan Radhakrishnan writes:

Lawyer Mason is back, no, no ... not Perry Mason, but Lou Mason, lawyer-author Joel Goldman's legal thriller series protagonist. Dashing, maverick with an uncanny ability to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, Mason is an enigmatic character.

Following his successful murder investigations in The Last Witness & Motion To Kill, Mason's popularity has soared & he is now a top-notch defense lawyer. This time around he has a hard case to crack: a middle-aged couple, Carol & Arthur Hackett, have sought his help in defending their daughter Jordan, a psychiatric patient who is accused of killing her shrink, a radio psychiatrist par excellence who had endeared herself to Kansas City listeners with her popular radio program.

Dr. Davenport's murder shoves the Kansas police into immediate action. However, even before the investigation enters its first stage, twenty-one year old Jordan has confessed to the killing -- by shoving the shrink from the 8th floor window of Davenport's clinic -- making the job of the police reeeeal easy. Only a formal trial stands between Jordan & her being sentenced to the gallows or the asylum for the mentally ill.

Mason feels that there is something strange going on, & fears that Jordan was unduly induced to confess to a crime she didn't commit, most probably by “Centurion” Johnson. Who Johnson is, is my friends, for you to find out. But his client holds steadfast to her confession. What follows is an excellent whodunit, with suspense galore, where a lawyer defends a client who is hell-bent on going to ... well, hell itself.

I enjoyed Cold Truth very much. Joel Goldman has a style of narration that's gripping right from the first sentence. His debut work Motion To Kill started this way: “A dead partner is bad for business, even if he dies in his sleep. But when he washes ashore on one side of a lake and his boat is found abandoned on the other side, it is worse. When the sheriff tells the coroner to ‘cut him open and see what we've got’, it is time to dust off the resume.”

Cold Truth starts, “Locked into his camera and headgear, Ted Phillips, the Channel 6 Cameraman, didn't hear the window shatter eight stories above or the woman scream as she jackknifed through the glass” With a start like this who wouldn't be glued to the pages!

One thing's sure Joel Goldman is one of the definitive legal thriller masters of this Millennium.

More from Joel Goldman:
The Last Witness
Motion To Kill
(04/24/05)

Narayan
2005©Narayan Radhakrishnan
A RebeccasReads.Com Sr. Associate Reviewer

Reviewer's Bio:
I am a 26 years old lawyer practicing in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. Along with my legal practice, I have finished post-graduate studies for both Business Law & Human Rights. I am a self proclaimed numero-uno legal thriller lover & am the proud owner of all of Grisham's & Turow's novels. I enjoy John Mortimer's Rumpole & relish an occasional Martini & a rare Scot(ch)t-oline with a Patterson on the side.

My work A FICTION OF LAW is now about 500 pages in length & features 500 lawyer authors & 2000 legal thrillers covering a 300 year period - inclusive of entries from the USA, UK, Asia, Europe, China, Middle East etc. Still in search of a publisher.
www.keralatourism.org