A Criminal Appeal

Fresh out of law school, Nora Lumsey - a farm-bred, big-boned woman, recovering bigot, and a compulsive meddler - has just begun her clerkship for Judge Carter Albertson of the Indiana Court of Appeals when she is instructed to draft an opinion affirming the conviction of Dexter Hinton, a deaf black child who has confessed to the murder of an elderly white woman in a drive-by shooting. When Nora discovers a personal connection to Dexter's family, she finds her passion to do justice at odds with her role as a ghostwriter for the judge and "handmaiden to the law," and she is torn between her idealism and her ethical obligations to the court.

Risking disbarment and criminal prosecution, Nora joins Owedia Braxton, Dexter's former teacher at the deaf school, in the cause of winning Dexter's freedom and finding the real killer. Their investigation draws them into a complex web of inner-city politics, gang warfare, and racial hatred. With rival gangs from the inner city and the suburbs hot on their trail, Nora and Owedia pursue an elusive gunman known only as "Mr. E" and find themselves entangled in an underworld of bigotry and violence and on the verge of uncovering a conspiracy of deadly corruption.

At once a page-turning thriller, a chilling look at a city in a crisis of violent crime, and a moving, finely drawn portrait of a fiercely independent young woman, A Criminal Appeal is a moral rollercoaster ride into the heart of American prejudice, and the debut of a bold, exciting new novelist.

Ten-year-old Dexter Hinton's conviction in the drive-by shooting of elderly robbery target Cora Rollison was routine once the judge admitted the confession that Dexterd recanted after talking to his grandfather and guardian Carl Hinton. And now it looks as if the appeal Carl has painfully cobbled together will be denied with equal dispatch. Judge Carter Albertson, of the Indiana Court of Appeals, tells his first-year clerk Nora Lumsey that the verdict is to be affirmed without ado. But Nora, who overlooks no chance to reiterate that she's a big-boned woman used to locking horns with authority figures, looks deep enough into the record to notice that Carl Hinton is a neighbor of hers. Unwisely and incredibly, she drops by his house to introduce herself (though concealing her job), listen to his hard-luck story about his poor deaf grandson, and, eventually, come out fighting for Dex's release despite the threat of disbarment if either side she's working for ever finds out about the other. Beset on every front by inner-city gangstas who want the buck to stop with Dex and by big-city politicos who don't want a freed Dex to turn into another Willie Horton, Nora ends up risking more than she'd ever imagined when she said hello to Carl Hinton. Nora's harsh, uncompromising voice, something new and welcome in the genre, makes the extravagantly improbable premise of her first case worth the stretchthough it's a relief to find her headed to more suitable employment at the fade-out. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.