Publicity blurbs are usually at least half wrong, but rarely in the way this book's were, because although it's nothing at all like the TV series CSI, it very much is like Law & Order, and, in this case, one out of two is excellent indeed.
Old City Hall opens with a popular Toronto radio talk show host confessing to his newspaper delivery man that he has killed his wife. After that, he refuses to speak. And from this point, the book does resemble Law & Order, in the way its story moves between the investigating cops, who keep turning up conflicting or mitigating evidence, the defense lawyer who is at once perplexed by her client's silence while thrilled at the prospect of such a high-profile case, and finally, the prosecutors: an ambitious Latino Crown Attorney who is being forced by his superiors, for political reasons, to avoid a plea-bargain and pursue the maximum penalty. It has all the elements, including the changes of locations and the quick pacing, that have made the US television series so compelling for so many years, but that is not to lessen the quality of the book itself.
Working with an ensemble cast is difficult: certain characters can wind up being sketched in, the narrative point of view can get confused, if not compromised, and the story risks overwhelming the cast. Happily, this is not the case here: Rotenberg fills in the details well, and although he obviously needs to build some twists into his plot, he resolves them with enough ambiguity to raise them above the level of pure device. Some readers might like to see even more nastiness on the part of the top Crown prosecutors, others may think there's some overdoing of the Indian who delivers the papers. But as a mix of both detective work and legal thriller, as both a puzzle and a study of characters, Old City Hall delivers. It's certainly the best first-novel I've read since Child 44, and that's high praise. And, since he seems to be setting up a sequel of sorts (albeit set in Italy, as well as Toronto), I'll look forward to the second.
Michael Carlson
Old City Hall
by Robert Rotenberg
John Murray £11.99 ISBN 9781848540286
