Blind Justice? A Review of Missing Witness
by Gordon Campbell
Reviewed by Betsy Burton
In theory, justice must be blind if it is to be fair; the same may be said of book reviews. If a critic is for some reason prejudiced for or against a book, the resultant review is likely to be biased. That being said, it is best to warn readers at the outset that this review is as far from blind as a review can be since (1) I’m not a critic but a bookseller, (2) I know and like Gordon Campbell, and (3) I feel about Missing Witness like a mother hen might feel about her favorite chick. The good news is that therein lies a tale (although not one I’m going to tell in this review). The bad news is you’re unlikely to hear snide comments, plot quibbles, or literary character assassination from this source – although in fairness there are few reviews in this town or across the nation other than that in the Deseret News (a subject that I suspect had more to do with religion than reality) that were anything but wholly positive.
First things first: Missing Witness falls within the genre we in the book business call legal thrillers. Such books run the gamut from the plot-centric books of John Grisham to the thoughtful, character-driven work of Scott Turow. Campbell’s book doesn’t fall within that spectrum but rather rises above it; Missing Witness is more compelling than the best books by either of the above-mentioned authors, the writing is more evocative, and the issues that form the core of the book give it moral heft and an interesting ambiguity that make it that finest of things in the book world (at least in my opinion), a wonderful novel.
The setting of Missing Witness is Phoenix, Arizona, and its narrator, Douglas McKenzie, is a young man fresh out of law school who has returned to his hometown for one reason – to practice law with Dan Morgan, the pre-eminent criminal defense attorney in Arizona, if not the country. The year is 1973, and the book’s plot revolves around a crime that is also a puzzle. A mother and her 12-year-old daughter walk into a small house on a large ranch and shots are fired. The daughter is hospitalized in a catatonic state and the mother is arrested for the murder although there is no way to be entirely certain who pulled the trigger. Dan Morgan is hired for the defense. Doug McKenzie is chosen to second the case, in part because he has personal ties to the family involved in the crime, and in part because he was at the right place at the right time.
So far, a typical-enough legal mystery with a meaty, if not unusual, plot. But Campbell is just getting started – and so is Morgan. We are first introduced to this supercharged attorney on the golf course where McKenzie is locked in mortal combat (golf-wise) with a doctor who is a star in the firmament of Phoenix society. A golf cart appears bearing two men, one of
whom is unshaven, disheveled and tipsy, clearly on the tail-end of a spree. At first blush, not anyone’s idea of Perry Mason, Morgan on a case becomes an entirely different animal – one who is focused, intense, intent on plans not apparent to those who watch him. As McKenzie follows Morgan’s path through the possible murder scenarios and the various legal defenses they suggest, he not only learns the ABCs of trial law, he also discovers that Morgan’s manipulative powers are not confined to the courtroom. And while McKenzie begins to find his own feet in that same courtroom, the reader sits waiting for Morgan to deliver the spectacular coup that is clearly in the offing. Although it would be unfair to readers to say what that coup is, it isn’t unfair to point out that only two people were in the house where the shots were fired. Thus, when the mother is in fact declared not guilty, the shock isn’t that the daughter is charged with the murder, the shock is that Morgan, who, at least by implication, proved her guilt, is hired to defend her.
The plot involves much more than the trials of first the mother and then the daughter for a murder one or the other must have committed (as if that weren’t enough). The book is spangled with characters whose lives are intertwined and who come alive on the page, pulling us into 1970s Phoenix, into the case, and into the underbelly of a major law firm as McKenzie begins to (often painfully) discover its true nature. But the central issue isn’t a plot issue at all. Nor is it character, as alive and lifelike as the characters are. For the real question isn’t who pulled the
trigger in the house, it’s how an attorney can in good conscience free someone he knows to be guilty (and since one or the other committed the murder, Morgan is clearly bent on doing exactly that, as are all defense attorneys worth their salt). On one level this is an elementary question, one asked of lawyers over and over again by the “public,” one they disdain since it is axiomatic that everyone deserves a fair trial, deserves the best defense an attorney can provide. But that’s a legal answer to a question that also deserves a human response. And the human response is not necessarily so clear cut.
To say more would be telling; suffice it to say that this and other issues involved in the case, in Morgan’s manner of handling it, and in McKenzie’s responses to the facts as they unfold (and to Morgan) make this a wonderfully complex and ambiguous tale. The characters do spring to life for the reader – not just Morgan, alternately a hard-drinking roustabout and a brilliantly focused orator, but also his polished opposite number at the firm, a host of other attorneys, and the rancher whose daughter-in-law and granddaughter are suspects in the murder of his son yet who hires Morgan to defend them. Finally and most importantly, young McKenzie is the book’s moral center in much the same way as the youthful narrator Jack Burden was in All the King’s Men.
Missing Witness is a blistering read. Campbell is a born storyteller, one who’ll stop you in the hall to tell you a story, who seems to have them spinning in his brain non-stop, who sees gathering strands of pattern where most of us see loosely tied facts, sees drama where most of us just plain miss it. He has a staggering narrative gift sharpened by an analytical legal mind, years of trial experience, and a canny perspective on law and on people. Critics from across the country, in reviews from such prestigious papers as The Boston Globe and the Chicago Sun Times to countless internet blogs, have compared Missing Witness not just to the best of Scott Turow but to the work of everyone from James Gould Cozzens to Robert Penn Warren. It made the New York Times best seller list right after publication and booksellers nationwide have loved it, loved hand-selling it to their customers; it’s clearly going to have a long and happy life in paperback as well.
Campbell has already started writing another book and although he’s so in demand promoting this one (not to mention being involved in a major case) that he hasn’t found much time to write, he has the setting (Salt Lake City), the plot, and the characters firmly in mind. Campbell, the real thing in your world, a talented attorney who is finishing up a brilliant career in law, is also the real thing in mine – a wonderful novelist just setting out on a brilliant career in books.