I've just finished reading "Devil's Corner" by Lisa Scottoline. It's usually not a good sign when phrases from "Ed Wood" start running through your head, notably "it's all about suspension of disbelief!" And yes, I was having trouble suspending disbelief for this book.

OK, if you don't want to know what happens, don't keep reading.

The main problem was this. Say you've been arrested for a crime you didn't commit. You have a fair inkling who might have committed the crime, but for various reasons - you're related to them - you keep quiet. Well, mostly quiet. As a result of "getting mouthy with the judge" you are remanded in custody for a year while waiting for your trial to come up (a bit harsh for a contempt of court charge, for starters). A couple of weeks before the trial you hear via the grapevine/television that the star witness against you - a person who you don't know from Adam, incidentally - has been murdered. The following morning the prosecution lawyer rocks up and attempts to get you to change your plea to guilty. You keep quiet. The lawyer then gets really aggro and, while you are still chained up, proceeds to attempt to slap you around a bit. Your lawyer and the prison guard intervene, the prosecution lawyer leaves, you decide to sue. Later that day you're released from custody and the original charges are dropped due to lack of evidence (and dead witness.)

You return home to find your mother stabbed to death. In the house is the prosecuting lawyer's wallet, without any cash left in it. (Your mother was a crack addict. You feel nothing at her death, incidentally.)

Seriously, is there any way in hell you would consider co-operating with the prosecuting lawyer for the rest of the book? Rather than, for example, suing her arse off, getting her arrested on murder charges and leaving town to start somewhere else? I just couldn't see it. And that was without getting into the twin issues of race and class, both of which also play starring roles in this book. Even the suing of the prosecuting lawyer for the assault in the prison gets dropped, out of the goodness of your heart and because you've now become friends with the prosecuting lawyer. I dunno, I think I'd still be a little too bitter after spending a year on remand. At least this way I'd be likely to get the cash.

The prosecuting lawyer was also irritating me. I couldn't work out what her job description actually was, although she was doing a lot of things that she'd been told fairly specifically weren't part of it. Like, for example, trying to intimidate people by assaulting them while they were handcuffed, following people in cars to solve crimes, all sorts of things that I really didn't think were part of the daily routine of a junior prosecuting lawyer. Of course this is from a different criminal justice system than the one I live under, so maybe they do use lawyers as extra PIs. Who knows. Taking witness statements seemed to be the only part of the actual job that she managed to do. And even then, her star witness ended up dead before she managed to get her to sign off on the statement, not least because she'd been faffing around doing other stuff.

Then you have the love story. Or "love" story. I actually didn't mind the start of this - girl meets boy, falls in love, realises boy is already married and devoted to his wife, girl stays best friends with boy while eating her heart out from inside - OK, that I could sort of relate to. It was the "boy discovers wife is cheating on him, boy realises within days he's actually always been in love with girl, boy jumps into bed with girl, boy starts telling girl that she should behave differently because she's his girlfriend of, ooh, 3 days (shortest honeymoon period on record!), boy realises this is unreasonable and that girl is like totally perfect despite having a lawsuit against her and being suspended from her workplace for doing insanely stupid things that led to the lawsuit" that got to me. Does anyone go from "totally devoted to wife" to "actually, you're the one I've been looking for!" in less than a week? I just read it as a total rebound relationship - which if it had been, would have made the book a whole lot more interesting. Particularly when he met someone better, and dumped his friend/rebound for them.

Then you have the ending. Again, leaving aside the twin thorny issues, this just didn't work for me. How likely is it that a head of department is going to conspire in such a stupid way, then confess all while mildly drunk? (What is it with people spontaneously confessing in crime novels and TV shows, anyway? Watch something like Cops or Police Ten-Seven or even Motorway Patrol and you very quickly notice that people rarely spontaneously confess to anything - in fact they usually attempt to barefacedly lie their way out of it, even when the evidence is staring them in the face. "Driving with an expired license? No sir, my license is perfectly valid - that 1998 expiry date is a misprint. No, I've not been drinking at all. And Didak was at home, and totally uninvolved in the JFK assassination.") When there's little to no evidence of anything and the guilty party could probably have brazened their way out of it, especially seeing as the allegations were coming from someone with a history of dodgy behaviour, who spent a large part of the novel suspended and one step away from being fired. And then the HoD failed dismally to commit suicide, despite having a gun handy. Unfortunately he also failed dismally to commit murder, preferably taking the main prosecuting lawyer and her newfound love with him. Pity, opportunity wasted there.

Still, on the positive side, it was a fast moving story, which got me from home to work and back. And it had fewer holes and much less torture than 24, so I shouldn't complain too loudly. I may even borrow another one from the library, just to check if they get any better at all. After all, picking plot holes can be just as much fun escapism as a good plot.