It’s no surprise why Sharyn McCrumb is a bestselling author. In THE DEVIL AMONGST THE LAWYERS, she accomplishes a feat most writers wouldn’t be able to pull off. She creates a large cast of fascinating characters, differentiates them significantly from each other, tells their own individual stories in relatively few words, and combines them all into a solid overarching story. It’s a character study within a mystery.
This book is the eighth in McCrumb’s “Ballad” series, set in the Appalachian mountains of Wise County, Va. A young woman has apparently killed her father in a fit of rage. For some reason, the case gets a bit of national attention, and so a few big-city journalists are traveling to the area to report on it.
We meet Henry Jernigan, the accomplished pro with a haunting secret; Rose Hanelon, the sad cynic; and Shade Baker, the disinterested photographer. We also encounter Carl Jennings, a local reporter from Tennessee who hopes that his youth and the fact that he’s a local may help him get the big story.
The actions and attitudes of the journalists are the real story here, as the murder case itself paradoxically gets scant attention. Set in the 1930s, but concerning something which could just as easily reflect our situation today, McCrumb explores the stance of big-city elitists who deign to visit what we now call “flyover country” in the search of local color.
Jernigan and Hanelon don’t care at all about the people or stories they cover, and even Baker, who grew up in a similar area, fights the fight but has to take the photos they want because after all, it’s a job. Along the way, we are exposed to these journalists’ vicious bigotry and cynicism. Is journalism about truth, about telling stories the readers expect to hear so they aren’t confused by incongruous details, or is it just about selling newspapers?
While the author lays the anti-journalism tirade on a bit too thickly, she manages to create a tale that only indirectly deals with the murder case (handled snappily in an epilogue) and focuses instead on the characters surrounding the trial, and how their actions affect the town in which the crime occurred. Matched with her usual attention to detail (yes, she really does know how a 1930 Ford Model A “heater” works), her brisk and accurate descriptive prowess, and her basis of real-life stories, this is another series entry you’ll want to read. —Mark Rose
Related posts:
- Kill All the Lawyers
- BULLETS, BROADS, BLACKMAIL & BOMBS >> Lawyers, Guns and Money
- The Devil of Nanking
- The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession
- Friend of the Devil
