Irreparable Harm - Melissa F. Miller
| Meet Sasha McCandless, Russo-Irish-American lawyer for what pretty much has to be the only white-shoe firm in Pittsburgh, PA. When one of the firm’s biggest clients, a hometown airline, suffers a major incident; Sasha’s on the case like white on rice. Little does she know that an evil tech guru brought down the company’s airliner with a bit of electronic wizardry and some good old-fashioned chicanery. As Sasha sashays from office to courtroom to suburban DC, along the way she picks up an Asian-American air marshal and a posse of Ukrainian hitters who’ve somehow figured out that she knows too much. Luckily for Sasha, the 5-foot-0 97-pound lawyer found time during all those 80-hour work weeks every lawyer (supposedly) works to become world-class in krav maga, capable of disarming and beating up not just big goons but also trained lawmen. Must be nice… |
Even as the bodies begin to pile up Sasha and her pet marshal find themselves in a race against time, some nasty wannabe killers, and a hostile judge to ensure that they put paid to the plot – whatever it may be – and prevent a case of Irreparable Harm.
Melissa F. Miller’s first Sasha McCandless legal thriller, Irreparable Harm seems to be equal parts legal, thriller, mystery, romance and fantasy. As befits the legal heroine, McCandless is – of course
- A working-class girl who is twice as smart as the rich kids
- A shrimp who can kick the ass of giants who outweigh her by two to one
- Drop-dead gorgeous and unaware of it
All that makes for an unfortunately by-the-numbers entry in the legal chick-lit sweepstakes that was immediately gobbled up by readers of lightweight chick-lit everywhere. Never mind that the premise is baseless and that the action is more akin to a special-effects extravaganza than real life. All that’s too bad, in fact, because Miller starts out writing fairly well, but somewhere around the middle of the volume everything starts to fall apart. The bad-guy list ultimately degenerates into a colossal cascade of coincidences, the legal bits become tedious, and the action stops being suspension of disbelief in favor of something at the level of comic-book plotting. Definitely a shame, since Miller is a markedly better than most lawyers who pen legal thrillers (which isn’t necessarily saying anything).
Miller’s been pumping out the series at a rate of more than two entries per year (the seventh in the series, a novella, was just released). Given the rate of production, it’s small wonder that the plotting and characters are thin and the situations stereotyped. Acceptable reading, but overall, it's still just lightweight fluff.
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