by Edith Cody-Rice
Jilly Truitt is back!! Former Chief Justice of Canada Beverley McLachlin has just released a third novel in her Jilly Truitt series. It is a page turner. What amazes me is that a woman who has spent her entire career writing judgments which cannot be said to have a stirring imaginative content, has preserved an active imagination for fiction writing.
Jilly Truitt is a young Vancouver lawyer who survived a difficult and disturbing childhood and youth to pull herself up in life to the level of criminal defence lawyer. Her character rings true and contemporary with contemporary problems and Ms. McLachlin’s novels are peopled by a lively group of her friends and colleagues as well as her adversaries, many of whom you may have met at the grocery store last week.
The novel might be called a lawyer procedural, rather than the more familiar genre of police procedural. A young child has been abducted from a beach on Bowen Island, off the B.C. coast, and is presumed dead. Her mother, who has been denied access, is charged with her murder although no body has been found. Jilly, a new mother and out of the loop, returns to work to represent her and comes up against police tunnel vision, sloppy police work and social media hysteria. She, like the mother, is convinced that the child is alive, or at least she wants a body to be sure that she is dead.
The novel follows on from the best selling Denial which in closing, saw Jilly’s partner and father of her unborn child, shot dead in the foyer of her home. Now she is alone, with a devoted friend to help her care for her months’ old daughter while she ferrets out the truth.
The novel is completely of today. Jilly’s voice sounds solid and true to life. She faces all the problems of a contemporary female lawyer – work/life balance (good luck there), a client who lies to her, worries about funding the case, tricky opposinig counsel. She has to think ahead and with insight to suss out motives of both the suspects and her opponents. And she has to adjust her priorities to accommodate the central position her tiny daughter plays in her life.
And it is a pleasure to read a mystery set clearly in Canada with Canadian locations, customs, characters and a Canadian legal system.
This is an easy and engaging read. If it were June, I should suggest that it be a summer reading choice. As it is, it is a very good mystery read and we all love those for relaxation. Lawyers will recognize the dilemmas and non lawyers will learn something about how the law is applied in Canada.
Pulbished by Simon and Shuster
available at Mill Street Books in Almonte
