JAMES SHEEHAN – The Law of Second Chances. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, March 2008; paperback, September 2009.

   This book has been sitting in a stack next to my bed ever since I bought it, over six years ago. This week I finally got my money’s worth from it. While it’s not a knock-your-socks-off kind of novel, it does have some good moments, and once started, it kept me up last night well beyond my usual bedtime.

   I didn’t realize it when I began, but it turns out that this is the second book about Florida attorney Jack Tobin, the first being The Mayor of Lexington Avenue (2005). There since has since been a third, The Lawyer’s Lawyer (2013).

   His story is one awfully common in fiction, perhaps not so in real life. He had once been a very successful civil trial attorney, but having pocketed a twenty million dollar buyout after one case, he’s changed his way of living around, as of course we all would. What he does now, though, is work on behalf of clients who have been unjustly accused or convicted and would like a second chance to prove themselves, hence the title.

   This is a lengthy book, over 400 pages long and is made up of two separate cases, two that somewhat overlap, but they’re really quite different. In the first half of the book, Tobin finds himself negotiating a new trial for a convict who’s been on Death Row for seventeen years. The second half has him defending a (very) small time hoodlum who is charged with murder, with eye witnesses to prove it. Bennie is also the estranged son of a friend of Tobin’s, back in high school days in New York City.

   Sheehan writes in a flat but engaging style that gets the job done. He’s particularly effective when it comes to matters relating to Tobin’s personal life, including flashbacks to his boyhood in New York City. But Sheehan knows his law, too, and that’s what kept me reading far into the night last night. On the minus side, I think the stakes grow far too high in the second matter at hand, nor did I ever think that [SPOILER ALERT!] Tobin’s affair with a new girl friend was anything but far too soon.