PAUL LEVINE – Solomon vs. Lord. Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, 2005.

   This is the first book this long (547 pages) that I’ve actually finished in quite a while. I’ve started some, don’t get me wrong, but they’ve always been put down with me fully intending to pick them up again the very next day, but for whatever reason, good or bad, eventually I never do.

   What’s interesting (to me, anyway) is that the book was marketed as Fiction, not as a Mystery novel, even though both Solomon (Steve) and Lord (Vicky) are lawyers, and much of the book is taken up with with two legal cases, one of them a murder, or so the D.A. assumes.

   What the book really is, though, is a romance. One of those “when will they get together” love stories mostly written by women. Not “will they or won’t they get together,” since that’s a forgone conclusion, even though they are total opposites in character. She’s prim and proper, organized to the max, while he’s the kind of guy who wings it in court, playing even loosey-goosier in legal proceeedings than Perry Mason ever dreamed of.

   They start out on opposite sides of the courtroom, but losing the case to him gets her fired, so of course even though she “hates” him, they end up on the same side, defending a clone of Anna Nicole Smith (fictional) accused of killing her husband after an extended bout of kinky sex.

   She also ends up representing him in his attempt to gain custody of his autistic nephew Bobby, who has been abandoned by his drug-addled mother, which is another story altogether. I also have not mentioned that she (Lord) already has a fiancé, a wealthy, well-bred kind of guy whom women looking for security in their lives would beat down the doors for to grab onto as a husband.

   It is still hard to explain why this book needs as many pages as it does. Perhaps that is where the real mystery comes in. The book is often laugh-out-loud funny and definitely vulgar at times but not verging into even the borderline obscene and never ever as explicit in bedroom details as it might have been if it were a Harlequin romance written under today’s standards.

   It all ends happily, needless to say, with many more adventures in sight.

        The Solomon vs. Lord series —

1. Solomon vs. Lord (2005)
2. The Deep Blue Alibi (2006)

3. Kill All The Lawyers (2006)
4. Trial & Error (2007)

5. Habeas Porpoise (2014)