I stumbled across Robert Dugoni’s books recently, probably as a result of the hoopla over his latest bestseller, The Conviction. I thought I knew all the major courtroom and legal thriller writers, starting with Erle Stanley Gardner, but apparently not. So I checked out his writings over on Stop You’re Killing Me to find the title of the first book in his series. That’s how I came to read The Jury Master over the last three nights until after 1 am.
Dugoni held my attention unwaveringly much as the central character, David Sloan, holds a jury’s attention as a civil litigator who has never lost a case. The book begins with a trial that Sloan has just won, much to his disgust. So much so, it appears to trigger a memory of something horrific, similar to the fate of the wrongful death claim for which his despicable client was sued. It’s a memory, or nightmare, that recurs often in the book until its source is revealed in the end.
The book is a top-rate thriller. It has multiple mysterious threads of hair-raising events that occur to several different characters, none of whom have apparently met, but each of whom is drawn together by events surrounding an apparent suicide of an assistant to the President of the United States.
Other than the opening scene, there is no courtroom drama and no legal case involving attorney David Sloan. The only remote sense in which this is a legal thriller is that we learn, as a result of the book’s conclusion, why Sloan is “the jury master,” able to hold the unswerving attention of jury after jury.
No, this is a thriller of political and international intrigue, evil conspiracies and coverups, and relentless killers who must be stopped. It is the kind of book that cannot be put down, which caused me to keep reading long after standard lights-out. Yet there was a lot of plotting which went to the borderline of incredulity, and a bit over the line. For me, the more believable the plot, the more I like the book. I was drawn in mostly by the breathless action and the wonder of what would happen next. Most chapters (I didn’t actually count them) ended with cliffhangers.
I’ll read the next in the series and then we’ll see.
The Jury Master by Robert Dugoni: Grading Sheet Score: 91
