Genre: Legal
Thriller
Description:
“When does self-defense become murder? Kyle Morrison is about to find
out.
Kyle is an ordinary guy living a life he chose for himself. He has his
own diner. He has a great girlfriend. He has his privacy and a reputation for
being a good, hardworking man.
That all changes the day Kyle kills a 15-year-old would-be robber. The
prosecution thinks he went beyond self-defense. His girlfriend doesn't know
what to do. The Internet has made Kyle an unwilling poster child in the
nation's gun control debate. His attorney knows this case can launch his own
career into the stratosphere and wonders where his own lines are.
The Judas
Goat is a legal thriller told from the perspective of the accused, the
victim, the accomplice and the attorneys on both sides. It dares to ask the
question of who we are as a society... and who we are going to be.
Who will follow the Judas Goat?”
Author:
“Adam S. Barnett has been an attorney
since 1994. His focus has been on children's rights and therapeutic
alternatives to incarceration. His popular humor blog, Comics Make No Sense, ran for over 10 years. He lives in the Plains
region of the United States with his wife, Laura.”
Appraisal:
The preface to the book has this note from the author:
This book
addresses the issue of gun control. I did my best to present characters on both
sides of the debate in a fair and respectful manner. Please be mindful that
just because I put words in characters’ mouths, I don’t necessarily agree with
what they say.
I wrestled with what to rank this book because I think it does some
things well and other things not so well.
The not so well category includes the setup of the robbery. The “15-year-old
would-be robber” wasn’t at all credible to me. His kind-of-accomplice along
with the story of how they came together and why the attempted robbery happened
was only slightly more believable. While I understand why knowing both of them
and what got them to the point of trying to commit the robbery is important for
the setup of the rest of the story, this got the story off to a weak start for
me.
Although I’m not an attorney I often pretend to know what I’m talking
about in regards to legal issues on the internet and, to me, how this case
should end was obvious from the beginning. (Whether it does end that way is an entirely
different question.) However, I think the author did do a good job of making a
case from all sides. Although I didn’t change my position, I came to understand
other points of view better, which I think (based on the preface) is one of the
author’s goals. I’m also not sure what the author’s opinion on the various
issues raised is, which is indicative that he met his goal of presenting both
sides in a fair way as promised in the preface.
I did like Kyle, the main character, and thought his story was mostly credible,
both his backstory and how the story played out for him in court and
afterwards. But too much of the setup was weak, which made for a story that was
hard to believe due to the weak foundation in the beginning.
FYI:
Some adult language.
Format/Typo
Issues:
A small number of proofing errors. One issue that I spotted multiple
times was an issue that attorney authors seem to have a problem with, using the
word waive when what they intended was wave. As any attorney should realize,
once you’ve waived your hands, you’ll never be able to do it again.
Rating: ***
Three Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate
word count: 75-80,000 words
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