- Title:
- A Game of Proof (The Trials of Sarah Newby #1)
- By:
- Tim Vicary
- Pages:
- 458
- Rating:
- 4
A mother’s worst nightmare – can her son be guilty of murder?
Sarah Newby, who left school at 15, and was living as a teenage single parent on an inner-city estate, has worked her way up to begin a career as a criminal barrister. Then in a terrible irony her own son, Simon, is arrested and charged with a series of brutal rapes and murders. The evidence against him appears so strong that his QC advises a guilty plea, but Simon swears he is innocent and begs his mother take on his defence. There is no law against a mother representing her son, so Sarah agrees. The only other obvious suspect for the murders, however, is a man who has already been acquitted once – with Sarah acting as his defence lawyer …
Has Sarah, in her single-minded determination to create a career for herself, neglected her son so much that she no longer knows him? Since he has often lied to her in the past, how can she trust him when he says he is innocent this time? And what should she do when she herself uncovers evidence that seems to suggest his guilt?
It seems that telling the whole truth must be weighed in the balance against keeping certain information well hidden …
I can’t say that this book wasn’t gripping. My two-year-old daughter had a most peculiar night; awake, but happy to lie abed and be in my presence. I of course would have preferred to be asleep, but as she didn’t demand anything other than a hand to hold and a warm body to cuddle up to, I found myself plowing through this with an almost guilty enjoyment.
it’s not my usual sort of book, I can’t remember the last courtroom drama I enjoyed. But something captivated me and kept me reading, and I found the whole experience strangely satisfying and rewarding.
Inevitably, there were a few issues that made me stop and think. pyschological is a typo so glaringly obvious that any proofreader actually looking at the text should spot it instantly, and then there were the small plot points and inconsistencies that prevented a five star rating: the use of 1471 to see who last called returning a call hours before we know Sarah called there herself, misquoted dialogue from the automated call return service, the use of the anachronistic DVLC instead of DVLA … all these things set the British flavour of the work off kilter and throw in fractures that prevent the world from snapping together as it should.
Nevertheless, though it’s not my usual type of read, I’m interested now: I’ll be buying more.