Title: The Neon Lawyer
Author: Victor Methos
Genre: Mystery
How I got the book: I bought it on my Kindle
Summary (from Amazon):
With money and hope in short supply, newly minted attorney Brigham Theodore decides it’s time to lower his standards. He joins a seedy fly-by-night firm in Salt Lake City out of desperation. After he loses his first case—a speeding ticket—he’s convinced his career is over. But to his shock, his boss hands him a slightly more complex case: capital murder.
Brigham’s new client is Amanda Pierce, a lost, exhausted woman who gunned down the man who tortured and killed her six-year-old daughter. A jury may prove sympathetic to her unbearable pain, but the law is no fan of vigilante justice—and neither is Vince Dale, the slick and powerful prosecutor who’s never lost a murder case. There’s no question that Amanda pulled the trigger—she did it in front of five witnesses. If she pleads guilty, she will avoid a death sentence, but saving her life this way comes with an admission that what she did was wrong. However, if she refuses the “guilty” label, Brigham will have no choice but to fight for his career—and Amanda’s life.
My Review:
Being only 166 pages, The Neon Lawyer was a quick read. Brigham Theodore is thrown into a high-class, important murder case as his first real case as a lawyer. His client, Amanda Pierce, murdered the man who kidnapped, raped, and killed her six-year-old daughter. How do you win a case like that when even the defendant admits she’s guilty?
While the case was interesting enough, there wasn’t a lot of action going on. It was a good read, but the protagonist didn’t even get the case until 60 or so pages into the novel. As I said earlier, the book is only 166 pages long. They didn’t get to court until there were about 30 pages left of the book. The beginning was slow while the ending went too fast.
However, the court was well-written and I enjoyed the tiffs between Brigham and the prosecutor. I don’t too much about lawyers, court, or the rules of the laws, but this was interesting and kept my attention the whole time.
My only wish for the book was that it was a bit longer. I felt as though so much more could have been done for the case and for the characters. There were some loose ends that I felt weren’t tied up by the end, which makes it feel incomplete.
Also, the last chapter was only four pages long which I didn’t think that was a good enough wrap-up for what happened to all the characters afterward. I would have liked to see an epilogue showcasing what happened to Brigham, the law firm he was apart of, his friends from the firm, as well as his client.
It was a good read, but I definitely think it could have been better.
The Neon Lawyer by Victor Methos gets 3 out of 5 stars.
Favorite Quote:
“There was a warm sensation in his gut that he didn’t recognize–maybe something between satisfaction and the beginnings of greed, for someone who had never felt greedy.” –Victor Methos, The Neon Lawyer
