• Michael Biehl: Lawyered to Death; Bridge Works Publishing, 2003, 300pp., $23.95
RALEIGH—A good whodunit is always welcome, but all the more so if, along the sleuthing way, it manages to lampoon some things that badly need lampooning. Lawyered to Death, the second novel by Michael Biehl, succeeds both as a mystery and as an indictment of the “justice be damned, we want more money” attitude that is now so prevalent in the legal profession.
The setting for the book is Shoreview Hospital in a small northern Illinois town that has seen better days. Karen Hayes is the hospital’s general counsel. She doesn’t make the big bucks of lawyers working in firms, but Shoreview is flexible about her time. That’s especially important because she and her jazz musician husband Jake have a new baby. She’s an ethical lawyer, doing her best to keep the struggling hospital from committing some blunder that would sink it in liability.
Using his extensive knowledge of lawyers and legal procedures, doctors and medical procedures — Biehl himself practiced and taught health care law for many years — the author constructs a web of events that entraps Karen. A wealthy patient dies suddenly while under treatment in the hospital; her husband is arrested. He happens to be Shoreview’s CEO, Arthur Winslow.
That’s a criminal case and Karen isn’t a criminal defense lawyer. She is drawn into the case, however, when a good-for-nothing “claims artist” (he gets his money by filing fraudulent tort actions against companies for self-inflicted injuries) persuades his attractive wife to seduce Winslow. She is a receptionist in the hospital and the “claims artist” contrives to make it look like sexual harassment. As the hospital’s lawyer, Karen has to make the phony harassment claim go away with as little cost as possible.
Karen begins to work with Matt Stoker, the high-flying young criminal lawyer who’s handling Winslow’s defense. Winslow has been charged with murdering his wife by, it appears, sending her poisoned chocolates while in the hospital and removing her medic alert bracelet that would have told physicians not to administer drugs to which she was deathly allergic.
Stoker entices Karen to leave her position at Shoreview to work for his firm, Van Dyke ~ Eddington (sic: evidently the tilde is now replacing the ampersand at aggressive law firms). The money there is far more than the hospital could ever pay and she hesitantly accepts the offer.
Quickly Karen comes to regret her decision, once she learns how vicious the world of legal marketing is. The Van Dyke ~ Eddington partners want her to sign up Shoreview as a client and help them achieve an annual billing of $600,000.
Karen knows that such a sum is wildly exorbitant and can see no justification for setting billing targets at all. “She understood the importance of marketing in many business contexts, but with professional services, it seemed too often to lead in the wrong direction. In law, it led to pointless corporate restructurings and endless litigation where the parties got nothing and the lawyers got everything.” The firm, she realized, was a school of sharks in expensive suits.
All of that may seem tangential to a murder mystery, but it’s not. The tableau Biehl presents is dominated by insatiable greed — the greed of lawyers who aren’t content to be merely rich, but want to be super-rich and will do anything to get there. Lawyered to Death is an excellent whodunit, but the strong, between-the-lines message is that we have a legal profession that’s out of control and doing a great deal of damage.
Naturally, Karen gets to the bottom of the case. But just as the reader is savoring her detective work, he realizes that there are 50 pages left in the book. It’s one of those surprise endings. Biehl saves the best for last and you won’t want to put it down.
Unethical lawyers aren’t the book’s only target. Biehl also directs his scorn at doctors who peddle worthless treatments to desperate people and foundation trustees who ignore the donor’s wishes so they can loot the foundation for their own benefit. Lawyered to Death isn’t just a cracking good story. It’s a brief against all sorts of professional depredations.
Biehl’s characters are well-drawn and the dialogue crisp. The action is fast-paced. He should write more books. Maybe he should even give up legal practice — but then the country would lose one honest lawyer.