Wrongful Death.

Baine Kerr
Scribner
www.simonandschuster.com
368 pp., $25

One has to wonder: Are there enough legal phrases out there for all the courtroom-drama novels being written? When someone publishes one titled Res Ipsa Loquitur, we'll know they're running low.

Baine Kerr, a Colorado trial lawyer and author of the highly regarded Harmful Intent, has written another legal thriller, Wrongful Death. It's the story of attorney Elliot Stone, who serves as conservator for June Stillwell. She lies in a coma after having been battered by an unknown assailant. Stone suspects her husband of the crime but lacks the evidence to do anything about it. After she dies, Stone investigates and discovers a pattern of mysterious deaths at the same hospital, which leads the story into totally unexpected areas.

The book also contains fascinating vignettes of the late-1990s Balkan crisis and efforts to bring perpetrators of atrocities to justice: Stone spends some time as a prosecutor at the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. This gives Kerr a chance to show his knowledge of geopolitics and even philosophy, as in his discussion of Immanuel Kant's theories of universal moral standards and how they relate to the legal question of what duty of care citizens owe each other.

The intellectual candlepower that illuminates the book is striking, and the protagonist's shuttling between the worlds of domestic violence and international outrage leads to some important comparisons and insights. Kerr served as an elections supervisor in the Balkans, and his condemnations of the human rights abuses in that troubled region are written with clarity and force.

The core of Wrongfal Death, however, is the story of what is happening to patients at the Boulder, Colorado, hospital. The mystery unravels in two stages: first, during a grand jury investigation, and then, in a wrongful death lawsuit. The courtroom scenes in the second section are particularly vivid. Anyone who wants a practical primer on the surprises that can emerge during a civil trial--especially those involving expert witnesses--and how a plaintiff attorney should prepare for them, could do a lot worse than to read the concluding chapters of Wrongful Death.

If anything, the verisimilitude goes too deep: Excessive detail about medical techniques and procedures occasionally bogs down the story. (The author specializes in medical malpractice cases.) But there are many fascinating incidents along the way, and the ultimate revelation of the reason for the pattern of deaths is chillingly believable.

Protagonist Stone, who finds himself facing a conspiracy of silence in the medical community, is forced to use some tactics, such as an unauthorized search of a hospital's laboratory, that you won't find in any civil procedure code. But a novel that focused on motions in limine and requests for admissions wouldn't keep you turning the pages.

Kerr's storytelling skills are excellent, but his characters are not as fully developed as they could be. We learn early on that Stone is mourning the death of his wife from cancer, but the rest of the book focuses largely on his actions as a lawyer and amateur (though quite effective) detective, plus some of his views on political topics, such as Ken Starr's investigation of President Clinton. The reader finishes the novel impressed with Stone's skills as a trial lawyer, but without having learned much about him as a person.

In some ways, the character of April Stillwell is more interesting, as she moves from being June's grief-stricken daughter (Stone initially calls her "a human mood ring") to an active and ultimately crucial participant in the investigation. The friendship between Stone and April, each trying to stay focused on the search for justice while overcoming personal losses, is touching and unpredictable.

Other important characters are Hans Leitner, a brilliant physician who may know more than he's letting on about what's happening at the hospital, and a couple of amusingly villainous defense attorneys who will do anything to maintain their winning streak in jury trials (no defeats since 1977!).

There's certainly no shortage of court-room novels on bookstore shelves these days--many, if not most, written by attorneys. But by weaving a tale of international intrigue into his main story of medical skullduggery, Baine Kerr has found a way to bring a somewhat tired genre back to life.

Thomas Scarlett is a contributing editor of TRIAL and an associate editor of the Law Reporter.