The Devil's Advocate - Steve Cavanagh

There is not a lot of nuance in Steve Cavanagh's latest Eddie Flynn thriller, but it's true that as far as the law and morality are concerned, good and evil acts should be clearly defined. While it seems a little heavy-handed then, there's certainly no getting away from the fact that this makes for a rivetting good read, the opening chapters of The Devil's Advocate hitting with maximum impact. Beginning with a tense scene describing an Alabama DA getting off on a likely innocent man getting fried on the electric chair, there is no subtlety or ambiguity about the position of Randal Korn of Sunville County being anything less than pure evil. He even permeates a scent "as if the man was rotting from the inside out".

On the other side of the coin we have New York lawyer Eddie Fynn, who if you haven't read the previous novels in the series, is a criminal lawyer who upholds the utmost standards of fairness in matters of justice and the law. As a former con man himself, Flynn has been known to bend the rules a little, gets his hands a little dirty and can sometimes (as in the last case Fifty Fifty) not be entirely sure of his ground, but it's all for the greater good. How he is going to measure up then against a DA who is the embodiment of pure evil?

Well, Cavanagh seems to even have provided a (literally) black and white case to push all those emotional buttons, and doesn't take long in laying it out either. A young black man, a barman and student Andy Dubois, has been accused of killing a young female co-worker in Alabama. Cavanagh lays it on thick, showing the girl on her way to meet her boyfriend who was planning on springing a surprise engagement proposal on the very evening when she is abducted and brutally murdered. You can be sure that Korn is also laying it on thick to get a death sentence for Andy. Flynn has been asked to get involved as a favour. He knows he is up against DNA evidence and a signed confession but has never been one to sidestep a challenge. For all these reasons this is going to be his toughest case yet.

Which you could genuinely say incrementally about every one of Eddie Flynn's previous cases, and yet it's not just Flynn but Cavanagh who has consistently risen to the challenge. What is different about The Devil's Advocate is that this one goes deeper than a personal legal tussle between two adversaries and even beyond swaying public opinion. This deals with a more disturbing undercurrent and history or racism in the southern states of America, as well as the appalling injustice of the legalised murder of capital punishment. Small-town Alabama does not come out looking well here, Eddie Flynn and his black associate not exactly being made to feel welcome by an insular and small-minded community of racists.

There are positive and negative sides to the approach Cavanagh adopts here. We're used to it to some extent when it's Eddie up against criminals and murderers, but it's a little more difficult and lacks subtlety when it is positioned as standing up to a whole corrupt system and historical evil. John Connolly can get away with this through the supernatural embodiment of evil in his Charlie Parker series, but it's a lot harder to deal with it in a conventional courtroom thriller. The positive side of course is that it does heighten what is at stake to such a degree that there is no question of it being Flynn's toughest case yet. The odds are overwhelmingly against him, and as such it makes this a powerful dramatic thriller. When this case goes to trial, it's explosive!

Is there room for any nuance in this position? Honestly, not much, but there is some. It shows how ordinary or otherwise good people can get caught up in a corrupt system. The case also highlights the sheer scale of the battle that needs to be fought against the legacy of historical attitudes and prejudice, and how it feels to be a single individual pitted against such forces. It's not just enough to have right on your side, or indeed put too much trust in the legal system in many parts of the United States particularly in states where there the barbarism of the death penalty is exercised.

It's significant then that Eddie isn't a lone-wolf lawyer any more. He has a good team around him now that has been built mainly in Fifty Fifty (with another useful secretary added in passing here), and Cavanagh takes full advantage of the nature and abilities of each of the team. I would have loved if some of the characterisation had been toned down a little - particularly on the side of the downright evil racist characters - but would, for example, anyone expect Colson Whitehead's writing to be fair and balanced? Cavanagh isn't writing a literary work on historical racism, but a courtroom thriller that challenges the inequities and abuses of the capital punishment system in the United States, and he makes it a typically tense, rivetting drama.

Reading notes: The Devil's Advocate by Steve Cavanagh is published by Orion. Reviewed from Kindle edition.