Prime Witness

June 28, 1993
``The ugly marketplace of justice''--as one character terms the judicial process--is scrutinized with a riveting, you-are-there immediacy in the new legal procedural by the author of Compelling Evidence. When attorney Paul Madriani offers to assist a friend--the county's ailing district attorney, who subsequently dies--in investigating six brutal killings, he becomes entangled in a series of machinations that threaten his career and even his private life. Though Martini's plotting proves ingenious (the story is capped off by a nail-biting encounter in a darkened courtroom), the legal maneuvers themselves take center stage here. From the crime scene--the banks of California's Putah Creek--to a deceptively simple arrest to fascinating pre-trial scheming, Martini packs his novel with the quotidian details of the wheels of justice--and the numerous cogs therein. Madriani's first-person, present-tense narration invigorates the often intricate proceedings with first-rate wisecracks and one-liners. His character descriptions are by turns pithy and funny (frequently both): the prosecuting attorney ``looks like nothing so much as Robert Duvall's incarnation of the Great Santini''; the county's female victim-witness coordinator is ``the crime victim's answer to Don Corleone in drag . . . known as `Attila the Hen.' '' Prime is indeed the word for this involving read.

When a number of couples are killed in what appear to be bizarre ritual murders, Chief Prosecuting Attorney Paul Mandrini must face the fact that there may be more than one murderer stalking Putaw Creek. George Guidall seamlessly interprets all--lawyers, police officers, judges with agendas, and underappreciated women--with his usual extraordinary aplomb. Almost passed over in this tough-guy thriller is the equally deadly subplot of ecological horrors unfolding in the deaths of peregrine falcons. To many listeners this subplot will be as unsettling as the ritualized murders of the humans. B.H.B. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine