Former university professor and law teacher Susan Rieger gives the epistolary form a fun twist, interspersing personal letters and e-mails with interoffice memos, briefs, transcripts, worksheets and other legal documents to deliver a clever, lively, engaging story, along with a crash course in divorce law.
Murder, not divorce, is attorney Sophie Diehl's specialty, so when she winds up helming Mia Durkheim's high-profile divorce case, she is as surprised as anyone. In Mia's mind, a criminal lawyer is exactly who she needs to combat the hardball attorney her philandering husband hired. Sophie is reluctant, but her unwanted client turns out to be the smartest, funniest, most interesting one she's worked with. Together they dish Daniel--a first-rate doctor and third-rate human being--the comeuppance he deserves.
Readers get to know Sophie in and out of the workplace as she deals with office politics, including a spiteful colleague who thinks the young lawyer stole her case, romantic drama that has shades of Portnoy's Complaint and thorny family affairs. Anchoring the story is the two women's entertaining correspondence, which is peppered with literary references, salty language and musings on topics such as the seven stages of divorce.
Rieger brilliantly blends the serious and the comic, offsetting the weighty topic of divorce with (sometimes dark) humor. When Sophie is first assigned to Mia's case, her boss warns her, "In divorce, there are very few satisfied customers." Not so with this immensely enjoyable debut novel. The verdict: if you like your fiction smart and witty, The Divorce Papers is a winner. --Shannon McKenna Schmidt