Apparently, Phillip Margolin couldn’t make up his mind if FUGITIVE should follow the adventures of a conniving Lothario across two continents, or focus on the legal challenges of defending this same character in a murder trial here in the U.S. So he decided it should be both, and then some. And the result is an overly long, unfocused mess.
The con man is Charlie Marsh, serving time in prison for tax fraud. But when he foils a prison break, freeing hostages and nearly getting killed himself, he becomes a hero. Marsh claims he experienced a spiritual epiphany during the attempted break, and writes a best-selling book that he soon transforms into popular self-help seminars held across the country. At one of them, he begins an affair with the wife of a U.S. congressman and is later accused of murdering the husband.
To avoid the murder trial, Marsh flees to the extradition-proof African country of Batanga, where he is protected by its sadistic dictator, Jean-Claude Baptiste. Marsh still hasn’t learned to keep his zipper up, and begins an affair with Baptiste’s beautiful wife. It isn’t long before Baptiste discovers it, and demonstrates the way he tortured and killed spouse. Knowing now that his own death is eminent, Marsh convinces an American tabloid publisher to finance his escape from Batanga and fund his murder trial back in the U.S., which he figures is the more tolerable of his fates.
The publisher hires noted criminal lawyer — and protagonist of three previous Margolin novels — Amanda Jaffe to defend Marsh. Along with all the complication this sensational case brings, Jaffe soon discovers that one of Baptiste’s lieutenants has been dispatched to America to capture Marsh, and that there are others who would kill to keep the truth of the congressman’s murder secret.
You realize how lopsided Margolin’s narrative is when you find that Jaffe, his series star, doesn’t make her truly active appearance until about 100 pages into it. But even then, Margolin holds off and instead presents several pages of backstory about a previous trial involving the congressman’s wife that was handled by Jaffe’s father. It’s at this point that you wonder exactly who and what the hell FUGITIVE is all about.
Perhaps knowing he has an impossible amount of ground to cover, the author desperately tries to keep the pace quick and the action moving. But he ends up glossing over many sequences and resorting to a prose style that is flat and so corny at times that it produces painful groans.
If FUGITIVE was Margolin’s attempt to prove himself as more than just a legal-thriller writer, then he unfortunately fell flat on his face. The courtroom and legal offices are obviously where he belongs. —Alan Cranis
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