Search - Perfect Justice (Ben Kincaid, Bk 4)

Gripping courtroom thriler

After a promising beginning, Bernhardt's latest thriller starring Oklahoma attorney Ben Kincaid, seen last in Deadly Justice , drifts into formulaic TV-movie scripting that slights its serious subject. When a young Vietnamese refugee is brutally murdered near Silver Springs, Ark., all the evidence points to Donald Vick, a member of the white-supremacist group Anglo-Saxon Patrol (ASP). When no one will defend Vick because of his politics, Kincaid, who is in Arkansas on vacation and believes that even those with heinous views deserve proper representation, agrees to take the case. For his pains, he is attacked by hooligans, beaten by a deputy sheriff, ostracized by the entire town and obliged to accept bodyguards supplied by the ASP Grand Dragon. This liberal's nightmare is simplistically portrayed: no opposing principals in the cast attempt to understand Kincaid's position, so there is no discussion of the issue at the story's heart and little narrative tension. Instead, the characters are people with permanently unchangeable opinions who mostly yell at each other. Even the story's fiery climax and the late twists of its plot have a set-piece quality that diminishes the novel's impact

Ben Kincaid always seems to land up defending the kind of people no one else would defend. In this case, it is a young member of a white supremacy group. Ben believes that this young man could not have killed the young Vietnamese immigrant in such a brutal way. But how to prove it? The town's people are against him.. including the police and judge and refuse to help him to the point of almost obstructing justice. Then the White Supremacist group itself turns against Ben and his young defendant. A real page turning thriller.

I confess, I did not read this book. It belonged to my son. The subject is too violent for my tastes.

Bernhardt paints a landscape filled with bitterness and racial hatred in the Ouachita mountain country of Arkansas. When Ben Kincaid agrees to defend a young man accused of murdering a Vietnamese man, he quickly becomes a pariah himself, loathed both by the townfolks and the members of ASP (something akin to the KKK). Nothing is ever as it seems when Ben Kincaid is involved.

A gripping courtroom thriller you can't put down... I was stunned by how real-to-life William Bernhardt's PERFECT JUSTICE is.