Reckless Disregard: A Parker Stern Novel
*Starred Review* Alcohol is usually the chosen Achilles’ heel for fictional fighters of evil, as in private eyes and lawyers. Rotstein gives his hero, L.A. courtroom attorney Parker Stern, a refreshingly new and entirely credible hero’s impediment—stage fright. This phobia came on suddenly, as phobias tend to do, in the first Parker Stern novel (Corrupt Practices, 2013) after Stern’s longtime mentor was found dead, a supposed suicide. In the second novel in the series, Stern has reached an unhappy solution, that of being a pretrial mediator. He sees himself as a complete burnout. But a spark remains. Stern is assigned to mediate a libel suit brought by a media mogul (on the level of Rupert Murdoch). The plaintiff, William Bishop, is suing a video-game designer for embedding clues in the game “Abduction!” that point to him as the kidnapper and murderer of an actress in the 1980s. An intriguing aspect of this legal thriller is the way that the action tends to mimic a video game, with Stern getting more and more enmeshed with false leads and bad guys. The real-life body count starts to mount, too, as Stern’s potential defense witnesses die under suspicious circumstances. Stern is a wonderfully complex hero in an occupation that forces him to combat his limitations. And this novel’s action really puts the “thriller” in legal thriller. --Connie Fletcher