‘You proved to have a singular inability to grasp the concept of fidelity,’ a woman tells an ex-lover. ‘Abruptly, the anxiety sharpened, its razor claws slicing through reason in his suddenly clouded thoughts.’ Why the ‘suddenly’? And if anxiety has rather than is the razor claws, how can it ‘sharpen’? As for the ‘abruptly…anxiety…suddenly’ sequence, well, the rhymes are as musical as Napalm Death on a bad day. Keene discovers that the old man was investigating links between the US government and a biochemical company that was conducting terrible experiments on humans. In While Justice Sleeps, a cranky Supreme Court judge falls into a coma and leaves his idealistic young law clerk, Avery Keene, power of attorney.
While the book does contain an authoritarian president who says comical things like ‘none of the damned Democrats on Capitol Hill will be able to stop me’, it is not a form of post-Trump therapy.
I thought the heroine might be a charismatic Georgia Democrat called Lacey A. I thought that he might be in league with the dark forces of the Alt-White and their well-groomed Nazi leader Richard Penser. What do I mean by ‘pandering’? Well, I would have bet good money that the book would contain a President Bonald Crump with Cheeto-colored skin and a penchant for being peed on by Russian prostitutes. Nor could anyone claim that the book panders too much to liberal readers. She has written several romance novels under a pen name and tells us in a charming author’s note that While Justice Sleeps developed over a ‘12-year journey’ that she ‘really enjoyed’. (For that, look forward to my editors asking me to review Hillary Clinton’s forthcoming novel State of Terror.) Abrams loves to write.
This is not some kind of botched cash-in. Still, for all the mean things you could say about Stacey Abrams’s new legal thriller While Justice Sleeps, you could say some kind things as well, the foremost being that it is not cynical. Expectations are low - or high depending on your appetite for other people’s failure. A politician publishing a novel is a bit like the lead singer of a rock band declaring that not only are they going to release a solo album but it is going to express their newfound interest in electronica.
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