After three legal thrillers (the first memorably titled The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living), veteran Virginia circuit court judge Martin Clark sets his fourth among the strip malls, tattoo joints, Ace Hardwares and gentleman farms of Martinsville, Va. The Jezebel Remedy centers on the marriage and legal practice of Joe and Lisa Stone--hardworking small-town lawyers who defend the defenseless and don't mind providing counsel to local outlaws and oddballs. "Petty Lettie" VanSandt is a prime example of the latter. A tattooed, animal-rescue, police-harassing, necromancer nutcase, she wastes Joe's hours with secret potion patent filings and lawsuits against perceived frauds like lightbulbs that don't last the promised year or a broken set of "clackers" (a 911 operator pictures Lettie "sitting there at her trailer with her gold tooth, wild-eyed, up to her neck in cats and dogs, probably juiced on meth, banging them balls together as fast as she can go until they shatter"). When Lettie offers one of her elixirs to a big pharma company and then suspiciously turns up dead in a meth cookhouse fire, Joe and Lisa find themselves in a complicated big-city case with their jobs and lives on the line.
Clark's legal bona fides provide plenty of courtroom and insider evidentiary drama, but his story also draws juice from moments of discord and reconciliation in Joe's and Lisa's 20-year marital and professional lives. Lisa's adulterous slip ("a needle full of passion... a two-day jolt over her for-as-long-as-I-live promise"), Joe's unbillable work wasted on Lettie, even the loss of their office-sharing dog, Brownie, provide a nice domestic balance to a plot full of crime-solving and legal maneuvering. With fiction talent like this, one wonders why Clark still sits on the bench. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.