She Treads Softly: Justice Bites

Monday, January 27, 2025

Justice Bites

Justice Bites by James Chandler and Laura Snider
2/18/25; 314 pages
Severn River
Smith and Bauer #1

Justice Bites by James Chandler and Laura Snider is a highly recommended, gritty, legal thriller and the first novel in a new series.

Small-town lawyer Marko Bauer is an alcoholic who is consistently late so it is inevitable that he is late when meeting his new client, Nick, who is accompanied by his older cousin Allee Smith. Allee is newly released from prison where she was serving time on drug charges and needs to find a job. When she learns at the courthouse that the Yellow Lark Restaurant will hire ex-cons, she applies and encourages Nate to do the same. After working there for several weeks she knows that she needs to find something else.

Allee learns that Marko has been picked up for DWI, and will lose his drivers license so she visits him in the jail and proposes he hire her as a driver. He hires her and he also has her meet with a client he was just assigned. This begins a new beneficial partnership where they help each other and disclose a whole lot of small town corruption.

This is a fast paced legal thriller with two very flawed but intelligent protagonists who are up against a corrupt controlling family in a small Iowa town. The plot can be predictable at times but the discoveries along the way will hold your attention. You will also have to set some disbelief aside that no one ever saw or exposed the corruption as small towns are know for their gossip. It is an entertaining plot and Justice Bites will hold your attention throughout.

This seems to be the start of a new series and it will be interesting to see where it goes. The ending indicates a promising future partnership. Thanks to Severn River for providing me with an advance reader's copy via Edelweiss. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.