Blind Man's Alley

June 14, 2010
More Grisham lite than Turow weighty, Peacock's second legal thriller falls short of the standard set by his Edgar-finalist debut, A Cure for the Night. When Duncan Riley, a rising star at a prestigious New York City law firm, accepts a pro bono eviction case, he welcomes this relatively straightforward diversion from the tedium of litigation practice. Then a complication arises: Riley's client, Rafael Nazario, is charged with the murder of the security guard at Nazario's public housing project who'd falsely accused him of smoking pot. While Riley gets approval from his mentor to continue representing Nazario, he feels pressured to cut a deal for his client, whom he genuinely believes to be innocent. Meanwhile, the attorney is receiving a great deal of attention from another client, Leah Roth, heiress apparent to a large real estate empire under scrutiny for its role in a deadly accident at one of its buildings. Peacock underdoes his characters' psychology, while the deus ex machina Riley uses to prove a sinister plot undercuts the book's atmosphere of gritty realism.

Starred review from July 15, 2010

An up-and-coming New York lawyer must simultaneously defend a powerful developer and a young man accused of murdering a security guard in Peacock's second novel (A Cure For Night, 2008).

As a product of a biracial, working-class family in Detroit, Duncan Riley often finds himself ill at ease with his role as a rising star at Blake and Wolcott, a white-shoe law firm in Manhattan. But partner Steven Blake has taken Riley under his wing and put him to work on the team defending Roth Properties—a commercial real-estate development firm and one of Blake and Wolcott's biggest clients—who need representation after a fatal accident at one of their construction sites. As a further show of confidence, Riley has been given some of the firm's image-burnishing pro bono work: He's defending Rafael Nazario, who, along with his grandmother, faces eviction at a Lower East Side housing project currently being redeveloped as mixed-income housing by Roth Properties. Just when things are going well for the Nazarios, young Rafael is charged with murdering the very security guard who got him in trouble in the first place. Although Riley doesn't have experience as a trial lawyer, he decides to defend Rafael against the murder charge, only to find himself under pressure from above to talk his client into taking a plea deal. Riley is torn between his career and his belief in Rafael's innocence, a dilemma further complicated by the attention he's getting from Roth Properties heiress apparent Leah Roth. Meanwhile, Candace Snow, an investigative reporter at the New York Journal, takes an interest in the Nazario case as she digs deeper into the Roth family's shady doings. Peacock, a former lawyer whose first novel drew comparisons to Scott Turow, brings this legal thriller—and especially the characters therein—to vivid life, portraying multimillionaires and project residents with skill. The prose is perfectly tuned, drawing the reader in without ever getting in the way.

Peacock writes compellingly about issues of class, identity and justice while still managing to keep the plot barreling irresistibly along.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2010
On the fast track to making partner at the prestigious Manhattan law firm of Blake and Wolcott, Duncan Riley is working to protect a big client, developer Roth Properties, in the wake of a fatal accident during the construction of a luxury condo. But he becomes more interested in his pro bono case defending teenager Rafael Nazario, first on a trumped-up pot charge that will get his family evicted from their apartment in a project thats being turned into mixed-use housing, then on a charge of killing the security guard who busted him. Investigative reporter Candace Snow, Duncans adversary in a libel suit brought by Roth, becomes his ally after hes ordered off the Nazario case and suspects that somethings wrong. As Duncans zeal and personal involvement with scion Leah Roth lead to trouble, he and Candace uncover a spiraling plan to hide corruption by any means necessary. Although some judicious editing could have tightened the narrative early on, Peacock (A Cure for Night, 2008) has a sure touch with legal thrillers, and this one thunders to a gripping conclusion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)