“The Right to Remain” is author James Grippando”s twentieth Jack Swyteck novel and my first experience with the author and his protagonist, criminal defense attorney Jack Swyteck. And the very good news is that Grippando makes the reader so aware of all of the characters’ strengths, flaws, beliefs, and concerns that we get to know them well during the course of the novel and don’t for a moment miss the backgrounds provided in the first nineteen. As a stand-alone legal/suspense piece of work, it’s a riveting page-turner from beginning to end.
Swyteck is a brilliant lawyer who is always fully committed to each of his clients and their rights to a fair trial and to every opportunity to tell their stories — no matter how difficult a given client may be. And that commitment is certainly tested in “Right to Remain.” His client in this case is a most unusual man named Elliot Stafford, who stands accused of murdering his boss, Owen Pollard, who was found dead in his own home. But the actual circumstances of his death are themselves mysterious and confusing, to say the least. The victim was shot from the front by a .22 caliber pistol and from the back by a shotgun. Makes no sense. Yet.
But all the clues put together by investigators point to Elliot as the perpetrator. It is known that he did not like his boss at all. Elliot’s prints are all over the place. He was definitely at Pollard’s house the night of the murder. And he’s weird. But Swyteck simply can’t see him as a murderer despite the fact that Elliot makes Jack’s defense almost impossible. The weird guy staunchly and stubbornly refuses to talk to anybody, including his own defense attorney. But Jack equally staunchly and stubbornly insists on not giving up the legal defense of his client. Equally frustrating is the fact that Elliot has secrets that might even go some distance in clearing his name. But he’s on a speech strike from which he refuses to budge.
With all the emphasis on Elliot and his strangeness as well as the terrible situation in which he finds himself, it’s important to return to the very beginning of the novel to examine the foundation of the plot that becomes the primary structure of the mystery. And it never even mentions Elliot: Owen Pollard and his wife Helena are in a hospital wherein a teenage woman is about to give birth to a male baby. The couple have made all the necessary arrangements to adopt the child, and the birth mother has agreed to give the child up for adoption. A healthy baby boy is born, and Helena has already named him — he will be Austen Mikhail Pollard. Why Mikhail? Because Helena is obsessed with the beauty of ballet. She was a professional ballet dancer and has since been a ballet instructor. Furthermore, she plans on making her adopted son a ballet dancer, too. She will train him. Owen despises that scenario but semi-accepts his wife’s plans because, like her, he’s desperate for a child.
But the teenager’s mother has her own plan. She’s a con artist, and presents her plan to the Pollards: her daughter, she says, has decided to keep the baby after all, and if she, the mother, is going to go through the trouble of talking her daughter out of keeping the baby, she wants a payment of $250,000 dollars.
The next thing we readers know, Austen Pollard is a bright and talented six-year-old child who is training to become a ballet dancer and has demonstrated a particular talent for ballet, a practice he loves. Owen is furious. He hates the boy; he abuses him; he hates his wife for making the boy what he is. And Helena hates her husband. Then, Owen is found dead on their living room floor. He apparently has left a suicide note claiming that Helena drove him to suicide. But there are several factors that lead investigators to believe that the note is phony, and that Owen was murdered. Anybody that hated him, including Helena, of course, is a potential suspect. But eventually, all signs and clues point to Elliot, the silent one.
Elliot refuses to verbally defend himself, even in court hearings. It’s all up to Jack to save the boy, but it’s ridiculously difficult to do so because his client refuses to break his speech strike. A most unusual set of circumstances to say the least, and a most impossible client. The plot of the novel then proceeds to gradually reveal each of Elliot’s secrets, Jack’s efforts to examine the possibility that Owen’s death really was a suicide; Jack’s methods of searching for the real killer if Elliot is actually innocent and Owen was actually murdered; and the horrors of Elliot’s life after Owen’s death. And the plot twists — there are many — are shocking but logical; the climax, though entirely unexpected (for me, anyway) is clever and rather beautiful, and the revelations of Elliot’s secrets are fascinating and even politically relevant.
Grippando has provided us with a gift that is rarely experienced so explicitly in legal/suspense novels. “The Right to Remain” is a powerful character study, and the character he so deftly describes is not the protagonist, but the accused killer. Elliot’s mind is a profoundly confused and confusing set of complicated elements, and is a testament to the author’s understanding of human weaknesses and strengths. Furthermore, society’s treatment of people who are “different,” are the “other,” is also thoughtful and wise — and even instructive. James Grippando’s twentieth Jack Swyteck novel is itself a fine example of the author’s brilliant style and wisdom. It encourages us to read the earlier books in the series and to look forward to novel twenty-one and, we hope, beyond.
REVIEW BY JACK KRAMER.
This review is based on the final, hardcover copy provided by Harper, the publisher, for review purposes.