Wrongful Death

With his last novel, Harmful Intent, Baine Kerr proved himself a master storyteller. At the time, I remarked to an audience that Kerr is one of those writers every reader wants to read, and every writer envies. I have a double-connect with this latest offering, Wrongful Death, first as a writer, and second as a former election supervisor in Bosnia (like Kerr.) My verdict: Wrongful Death is a classic waiting to happen. Both the tale and the telling are sophisticated and explosive. Kerr gives us a heart of darkness that is - literally - a land mine, planted in the rib cage of a Bosnian massacre victim. Page after page, we wait for the atrocity within an atrocity to detonate. When it finally does - of all places, in peaceful Colorado - Kerr's handful of heroes finds its true hidden heart, not in vengeance, but in justice. Wrongful Death does more than set a new standard for legal thrillers, it seizes the genre to speak to our times and demand goodness from the ruins.

I have to say, I couldn't see how Baine Kerr was going to juggle all the balls in this one. What possible connection could there be between a Denver hospital and a mass grave in Bosnia? But Wrongful Death pulls it off with grace and power. His Bosnia - so vivid and detailed - could have been Rwanda or any other nightmare out of current events. And we're not immune to the horror, even in the sanctuaries of our hospitals. Innocence comes of age in this one. I'm recommending it to my book club.

I'm constantly looking for novels that don't just give us an alternate reality, but actually give us our own reality stripped of the talking heads and politicos and corporate bull. Wrongful Death does that. Here's finally a book that brings Bosnia home, and shows how the evil that committed genocide in the killing fields could just as well reside here. I don't want to give away the ending, so will simply applaud Kerr's ability to create a killer who is not another serial remake of Hannibal Lecter, but a genuinely complicated and decent man who took a wrong turn. In exposing him, Wrongful Death exposes us all to the temptations of power and the tasks of finding justice.

Baine Kerr is back, at last. I devour mysteries and courtroom dramas, which is how I strayed across Kerr's last novel, Harmful Intent...and his incredible circle of powerful, indomitable female characters. Even wounded, even dying, they defy fate. In less capable hands, they would just be female superheroes. Kerr goes the extra mile. He creates real heroines, Trojan women for our times. Ever since Harmful Intent, I've been holding my breath to see if he would deliver again. To my delight, Wrongful Death gives us a whole new set of women to believe in. I love Kerr's novels, and puzzle over them. In each, our main man is a man, the atrocities are muscular, the injustice is as humanly wicked as it gets. But somehow, in each, the heart and soul are deeply, genuinely feminine. His "wrongful death", the death of June, is almost Shakesperean in its power. Wrongful Death is outrageously good.

Kerr's first novel was so good that I waited, quite impatiently, for this one.Some who read the first novel may be taken aback by the change in approach and pace. This novel is far more complex than the first; it will indeed take some settling in. But once you are hooked, and it doesn't take long, this intricately told story won't let you go. Many lawyers who write novels can tell a story, but can't write well. Kerr writes beautifully, and he tells a multilayered and ambitious story very well. While in his first novel the primary antagonist was (to my tastes) too little developed, in this novel that character is explored fully. And the four primary female roles are wonderful, each of them complex and interesting and compelling in a different way. The novel builds up, carefully, to a series of court scenes which are the most dramatic and tense of any I've read for a long while. I've thought about this novel constantly since I finished it.Bravo. I'm already waiting for the next one.