Judicial Whispers - Softcover

Caro Fraser

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0753804921 ISBN 13: 9780753804926

Publisher: Allen Unwin Australia, 1998

Synopsis

The second novel set in the barristers chambers of Caper court, of the love and duplicity behind the professional ambition and gloss. When Leo Davies set out to capture the affections of chilly but beautiful Rachel Dean, he takes on very much more than he bargained for. Rachel is a solicitor with a dazzling future before her and a dark and frightening past behind. Leo's tangled sophisticated life, Rachel's newly awakened passions and the unrequited love of Anthony's cross from the intricate cats cradle at the heart of this absorbing third novel by a writer who brings life with uncanny accuracy the obsessions and delusions of people in love.

About this title

Review:

A rumor campaign threatens to thwart London barrister Leo Davies's hope of election to that rarefied strata of the British legal hierarchy, the Queen's Counsel. The rumors are based on truth, for Leo's sex life is hardly conventional. In a typical mystery novel, such a scenario would lead to blackmail or murder--or both. But Caro Fraser's new novel is neither typical nor a mystery. All of the drama in this character study of a fascinating protagonist comes from Leo's interior struggle with issues of sex, love, class, and ambition. The real mystery is how erroneously this book has been cast as a legal thriller.

Advised that the best way to scotch the rumors is to take a wife, Leo becomes involved with Rachel Dean, a beautiful and emotionally rigid solicitor who has good reason to be so guarded. That Leo's close friend Anthony also covets Rachel might initially strike readers as an unnecessary diversion, but Fraser brilliantly uses the men's relationship to illuminate Leo's complicated sexual nature, which is enacted in his courtship of Rachel and his almost inadvertent wakening of her sexual passion. "There's too much fear in you," Leo says when Anthony charges him with using Rachel to further his own ambitions. "Don't you remember? Or don't you want to remember? There are things you don't want to confront--things about Rachel that you'll never understand. You're empty. You're devoid of anything that could help her, because you've never been to that part of yourself where you find out things, the best and the worst. But you're young. You'll learn." Leo's journey through the tortuous landscape of his own mental inferno makes for compelling reading in a sophisticated and engrossing novel. --Jane Adams

About the Author:

CARO FRASER was educated in Glasgow and the Isle of Man, before attending Watford School of Art. Afterwards she worked as an advertising copywriter for three years. She then studied Law at London University, Kings College, where she read for the Bar and spent six months in pupillage. She is married to a solicitor and has four children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Allen Unwin Australia
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0753804921
• ISBN 13: 9780753804926
• Binding: Paperback