The Legal Limit

Starred review from May 5, 2008
Clark’s profound and moving third novel (after Plain Heathen Mischief
and Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living
) explores the disparity between justice and jurisprudence. Mason Hunt, while visiting his mother at home in Virginia during his final year of law school, inadvertently becomes the sole witness to his deadbeat brother Gates’s cold-blooded murder of a man on a back road in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In the crime’s aftermath, the brothers vow to keep their involvement secret. Years later, Gates is incarcerated for an unrelated crime, while Mason goes on to become a prestigious attorney. Then Mason’s life is turned upside down when Gates, in a desperate attempt to free himself, turns state witness against Mason and accuses his brother of murder. Clark, a circuit-court judge, takes his storytelling prowess to the next level in what is his most substantial and thought-provoking work to date. Author tour.

Starred review from May 1, 2008
Raised hardscrabble by a violent, abusive father and an overwhelmed mother, Mason and Gates Hunt remain close even as their paths diverge. Gates, the elder brother, becomes a low-level drug dealer and self-pitying prison inmate, while Mason becomes a lawyer and ultimately Commonwealth Attorney for Patrick County, Virginia, his boyhood home. When Mason refuses to pull strings to get Gates released from prison, the brothers become estranged. But a secret from the mens distant past surfaces to threaten everything Mason values. This, however, is merely prelude for a superb thriller that ponders family, fraternal loyalty, marital love, child rearing, loss, integrity, tolerance, the fault line between law and justice, and even the economic well-being of a community. Clarks wise, knowing novel creates a strong sense of place by limning the mores of the traditional southern small town and by portraying a disagreement between a husband and wife that will resonate with any reader who isor ever wasmarried. This is a fine crime novel, but it is also a tough-minded look at hard lives lived by hard but not insensitive men. Recommend it to anyone who loves Daniel Woodrell.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)