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9780385353595: The Jezebel Remedy
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385353596 ISBN 13: 9780385353595
Verlag: KNOPF, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Martin Clark—who has set, according to the Winston-Salem Journal, “the new standard by which other works of legal fiction should be judged”—now delivers his finest novel yet.
 
Lisa and Joe Stone, married for twenty years and partners in their small law firm in Henry County, Virginia, handle less-than-glamorous cases, whether domestic disputes, personal injury settlements, or never-ending complaints from their cantankerous client Lettie VanSandt (“eccentric” by some accounts, “certifiable” by others).  When Lettie dies in a freakish fire, the Stones think it’s certainly possible that she was cooking meth in her trailer.But details soon emerge that lead them to question how “accidental” her demise actually was, and settling her peculiar estate becomes endlessly complicated.

Before long, the Stones find themselves entangled in a corporate conspiracy that will require all their legal skills—not to mention some difficult ethical choices—for them to survive. Meanwhile, Lisa is desperately trying to shield Joe from a secret, dreadful error that she would give anything to erase, even as his career—and her own—hangs in the balance. InThe Jezebel Remedy, Clark gives us a stunning portrait of a marriage, an intricate tour of the legal system, and a relentlessly entertaining story that is full of inventions, shocks, and understanding. 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MARTIN CLARK is a Virginia circuit court judge. His past novels have been chosen as aNew York Times Notable Book, a Washington PostBook World Best Book of the Year, a Bookmarks Magazine Best Book of the Year, a finalist for the Stephen Crane First Fiction Award, and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. His last novel,The Legal Limit, was the winner of the Library of Virginia’s People’s Choice Award and was called “a model of how to write a literary legal thriller” byThe Oregonian. He lives in Patrick County, Virginia, with his wife, Deana.

www.martinclark.com  

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

But . . .

Her husband, Joe Stone, was in his office at the opposite end of the building, a pair of matching Persian rugs and a long hallway of beaten oak boards distant, his door shut, their sweet cur dog, Brownie, probably dozing tail to snout on a chamois pad beside the heat vent, and Joe was no doubt explaining every boilerplate detail of the umpteenth will he’d prepared for his mercurial, crackpot client Lettie Pauline VanSandt, who, only a few minutes ago, had tracked red mud across the nice carpets and into his office, heedless as always. Nothing but a damn millstone, Lettie. For sure, neither she nor Joe would tend to the mud.

Lisa Agnes Kennedy Hotchkiss Stone and Joe had been married almost twenty years. She had five names, whereas he had only two, lacked anything in the middle. “NMN” was how it appeared on his driver’s license. Joe NMN Stone. She and Joe had been law partners for practically all those years, just the two of them and their various secretaries, as well as an office manager they’d been able to afford once the money became consistent. This very November morning, watching him pour a cup of black coffee in their kitchen, she’d appreciated—­again—­what a graceful and handsome man he was: tall—­right at six-­three—­but not gangly or a beanpole, thick hair that held its dark color and several waves at age forty-­four, and a face full of fierce calm that was laid in deep and precise, difficult to budge. She loved him, absolutely she did, she loved her husband.

A Virginia Code volume was open on her desk, but she’d gotten sidetracked and wasn’t reading it. A single page had cowlicked away from the rest, floating betwixt and between. Lately she’d felt a bit stuck, preoccupied with the flat patches in her life, mulling and noodling, flummoxed by how she seemed to have wandered across an insidious boundary and been shanghaied into a dull land of earth tones, Scrabble games, paint-­by-­number vacations, Cinemax replays of A Star Is Born, monthly potlucks, Lean Cuisines, cobwebs, dust bunnies, marital conversations retarded by a mumbled “Huh?” or a distracted “What, sweetie?,” community center Zumba classes, flannel, mismatched silverware, lukewarm champagne and box steps every December 31, matted fleece bedroom slippers and sex so mission control she could count down the seconds between her husband biting her neck and squeezing her breast. She worried that her entire world, from alpha to omega, was nothing more than a stupefying loop, a big, whopping white-­bread bonanza, comfort and familiarity their own worst enemies.

A sizable part of her delicate mood was rooted in the past summer, June and July, and its cause was obvious and easy to understand—­she’d lost both her parents with no real warning, just unfair as hell. Her momma was killed by a monstrous clot and never woke up from a noon nap, the laundry still wooden-­pinned to an outside line, a pound of shrimp thawing in the sink, a candy dish filled with pink, yellow and green butter mints on the dining room table, ready for Wednesday bridge club. Her darling dad was gone a month later, walloped by a massive stroke, so tough he’d held on for almost a week before he died, barely seventy, paralyzed and grimacing in a hospital bed and unable to speak, and it was impossible to sit through two sweltering Baptist funerals and not wonder when her day was coming, whether she was wasting her own precious time.

Also, and she tried not to be hateful about it, but bless his heart, some of Joe’s quirks and habits had become a pain for her, and this wasn’t helping her disposition, either. The charming cowboy boots she’d cottoned to back in law school now struck her as Henry County hayseed if he wore them off the farm. Naming their shaggy black puppy with the single white spot on his flank Brownie was genius, but then came Katrina and New Orleans and Joe hit his own endless jackpot, and every time . .  . every freaking time . . . the mutt would roll over or shake hands or fetch his tennis ball, as predictable as a cuckoo clock at half-­hour intervals, Joe would crucify her last nerve with the “heckuva job, Brownie” line, and yesterday, in 2010, he’d repeated it again, praising the dog for scratching at the kitchen door, the same slobbering ruckus every Tuesday, the pooch eager for the front yard, where he could bark and greet the garbage truck.

Joe would absolutely ignite and go Full Lewis—­her term, after Jerry Lewis’s spastic Nutty Professor—­whenever he heard the opening riff of “Black Coffee in Bed” or Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “Bad Luck.” No matter how many times he’d listened to the intro, no matter how dated and old-­hat the songs.

At work, there was the trite shave-­and-­a-­haircut knock despite her begging him not to do it ever again, please.

He would make her sit in his office and he’d “call the shareholders’ meeting to order” and they’d vote on replacing the gutters or buying a new computer, even though it was only them, Joe and Lisa, husband and wife—­they were the entire law firm.

She was weary of his corny “great googly moogly” and, at the other end of the spectrum, his crass, indiscriminate use of the word fuck.

Worst was his riding a motor scooter—­not a motorcycle, mind you—­to town in warm weather, this huge man putt-­putting down Starling Avenue, an embarrassing big-­ass helmet strapped underneath his chin so that he favored the Great Gazoo, the crazy cartoon alien from The Flintstones, and, yeah, of course he knew the whole deal was goofy, but she was unable to convince him that even a maximum dose of self-­awareness and a tongue-­in-­cheek penumbra can’t save some choices from coming off as idiotic.

To be fair about it, she realized that some of her failings had to bother him, especially how she often forgot to completely close the dresser drawers and occasionally spilled nail polish on the bathroom tile and never returned the living room phone to its base, and there were probably heaps of other irritations that he was too decent to mention. He kept things in check much better than she did.

She loved him though, she did, loved him in the fashion, she supposed, that you love a spouse hamstrung by two decades of marriage, loved him with most of the shiny paint scrubbed off, the gloss long ago weathered away, her affection down to the solid girders and nuts and bolts and sturdy welds, the steel guts of the arrangement.

But . . .

She stared at the taupe grass cloth they’d selected from a ritzy 1990 sample book as they finished refurbishing what had formerly been a hometown department store in the era of Perma-­Prest and fancy petticoat displays. They’d not changed the walls since, and now the fragile threads and stiff, strawy weave were frayed and broken in places, especially at the corners and above the baseboards, and a few loose lengths of grass cocked out from their bindings like crippled insect legs. A vertical seam had separated, and Joe had tried to repair it with a specialty glue he’d discovered at Walmart, but the fix wasn’t what it should’ve been, so there was a bulge not far from the ceiling, an obvious sag that needed attention.

Joe’s voice came over her phone, very formally asking if she could walk down the hall and witness Lettie’s will, his words sounding tinny and off-­pitch through the speaker. “Sure,” she said. She noticed the numbers on the...

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Verlag
KNOPF
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385353596
ISBN 13 
9780385353595
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Knopf
https://knopfdoubleday.com

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