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Janeology

Karen Harrington
Kunati Press (2008)
ISBN 9781601640208
Reviewed by Narayan Radhakrishnan for RebeccasReads (5/08)

I enjoy reading legal thrillers, and I read, at the least, about 35 legal thrillers a year. And more often than not, the novel will be- as author Charles Martin Simon puts it-  ‘about an ultra-chase, soulful-but-white, attorney/sleuth hero brought into the case backwards, fighting it all the way, against his better judgment, wishes, and all he stands for, against-all-odds, bad-guys-lose, good-guys-win type of thing.’ That said, I very much enjoy the genre, and dream of breaking into print as a lawyer/author in the near future.
           
“Janeology” proved to be refreshingly different, and gives a new direction to the legal thriller genre. A new ambit, a new scope hitherto unexplored in legal thrillers is the hallmark of this debut novel by Karen Harrington. And no, she is not a lawyer.
           
Tom Nelson is a college professor by profession. A family man to the core, his wife and children are the center of his universe. But Nelson’s wife Jane is suffering from post-partum depression following a miscarriage. Though, Tom Nelson is concerned about his wife’s present state of mind, never in his life did he imagine that she would resort to murder.  The murder victim is Simon, the 2 ½-year-old, toddler son of Tom and Jane. Sarah, Simon’s twin is also battling to save her life. And the reason for the murder, as Jane puts it is ‘I was done being a mother.’ The lawyers have carved a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, so far as Jane is concerned; but the real culprit in the eyes of the media and the law is Tom Nelson--the charge--the failure to offer protection of his family and leaving the children to potential harm in the hands of Jane.

Tom’s lawyers now prepare for an unexplored line of defense--the concept of genealogy--i.e., Jane’s gene setup, as inherited through her ancestors, is the root cause of all evil; and even if Tom had offered adequate protection, Jane was a bomb waiting to explode. Would such a defense come to the aid of Tom Nelson, and more importantly, can Tom Nelson return to life and offer solace and comfort to Sarah?  These questions form the plot of the novel.

I was intrigued and hooked on the novel, right from page 1 to page 246. Novel lines of defense, new questions of law in novels have been fascinating. William Diehl’s “Primal Fear” spawned of a dozen novels exploring the realm of Multiple Personality disorder in criminal trials; Phillip Margolin offered the battered women’s syndrome as a line of defense in women charged with murdering their husbands in a couple of novels, spawning of several such imitations; and so did Jodi Picoult start a new wave with the question and legality of organ transplantation and right to privacy in “My Sister’s Keeper.” Karen Harrington now joins this elite club of authors by giving a new dimension to the legal fiction genre.  I greatly, greatly enjoyed the novel “Janeology.”

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