Review: When Legal Meets Disaster
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 29, 2013
Just like any good established brand, the fourth Sasha McCandless novel is instantly recognisable as part of a series starting with Irreparable Harm and carrying on with the consistently named Inadvertent Disclosure and Irretrievably Broken. But it takes more than an intriguing, legal-sounding title to make a good legal thriller, and with this instalment in the series Sasha finds herself trying to prevent a disaster of near-apocalyptic scale: a pandemic of a deadly, man-made flu virus stolen from a pharmaceutical company. Yes, there is plenty of legal goodness to satisfy all of us amateur lawyers, but that is just one of the many elements that makes IP a real page turner, making it the most action-packed novel in the series so fa. Careers are in jeopardy, lives are at risks, and there are even some casualties: all in all, nothing that a good grasp of federal law and some self Krava Maga moves can't solve And, of course, a lot of coffee.All four books in the Sasha series have a very current, topical feel to them - they are centred around events or situations that would make headlines news - from an airliner crashing in Book 1, to the very controversial and current issue of hydrofracking in book 2, to a more traditional but still gripping series of murder in Book 3. By Book 4, Miller has made this cocktail of law and disasters her trademark, successfully creating a wholly plausible plot around what happens when a killer virus falls into the hands of a group of survivalists, also known as `preppers'. As if to confirm the fact that Miller always writes about `hot-off-the-press' subjects, only a few days after finishing the book, as I flicked TV channels I found an entire TV series dedicated to preppers. Once again, in the same way as with Book 2, I feel that I've learnt something through Miller's fiction.As someone who has been following this series from the start, I consider myself lucky, as the author never keeps us waiting too long. But what will happen when with those `I' titles? Will there be enough `I's to keep these books coming? Miller said she is committed to "I" titles--- until she runs out of legal doctrines, so let's hope that there are plenty of those in the law books to keep Sasha busy for a long time to come.