The Defence, by Steve Cavanagh

ISBN: 9781409152316
Amazon ID: B00O13O1TI

This is a fast-paced, action-packed thriller. It's a good story.

However, it's a little too action-packed from time to time.

The premise is that a lawyer has 48 hours to get his client acquitted; the challenge is that he's never met the client before and has no prior knowledge of the court case which starts on the following day.

The number of things he needs to achieve overnight before the court hearing commences is implausible. Fast-paced, and action-packed, but implausible.

Also, there's just a bit too much techno-bollocks in the story, for example (chapter 34) "I had the phone to do it - a heavily modified Nokia with a special SIM card. The phone was very expensive and for a good reason. The cell captured the network of the mobile phone it was calling. Technically, whoever I called was in fact calling themselves. For landlines, it threw out a random wireless search and hit the nearest landline connected to broadband and the call would be registered from that landline number."

Shortly after this ridiculous description, the hero makes a call from this phone claiming to be someone from the mobile service provider of the person he's calling, and claims to be able to disconnect the service. He can apparently discover which mobile network provider the person he's talking to is on, by looking at his own phone, and then by getting the person to hang up, but not hanging up himself, he can prevent them from being able to "get a dialling tone" (remember, this is a mobile network; dial tones are generated by the mobile phone, not the network) and being able to place another call.

You might be able to believe this if you know nothing about telephone systems, but it's complete rubbish.

Finally, I was going to say that the American writing is just a bit too much for comfort, when I found out from the biography at the end of the book that the author was in fact born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and studied law in Dublin, Ireland. He still practises there. So aside from the fact that this story is set in New York, there is absolutely no excuse for it being written with such a strong American (by which I mean, bad English) tone.

I'd be prepared to overlook "People who try to blow up public buildings in this city don't usually fair too well in sentencing" (it should be "fare"), but the jarring Americanisms are just too much, especially when they come from someone who should be able to write good English.

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