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DEFENDING JACOB
By William Landay. Delacorte Press. 432 pages. $26

Reviewed by Jason Barr
JASON BARR is a teacher in Harrisonburg.

William Landay’s latest legal thriller, “Defending Jacob,” is uneven.
Landay unfortunately provides us with a series of characters who range from paper-thin to incredibly irritating. And yet, what really makes “Defending Jacob” work are portions where the novel veers from well-worn legal thriller territory.

The work seems promising: An assistant district attorney, Andy Barber, catches a murder case in which one of his son’s classmates is found dead in a nearby forest. The number one suspect: Barber’s son, Jacob.

Unfortunately, Andy Barber is annoying and is frequently presented to the reader as the manliest of men: He is a sexual object and views women in the same manner, he is filled with testosterone (“I felt the enormity of the body that houses me,” he says as he intimidates a teenage witness), and is incredibly judgmental about everyone he meets.

Another character who appears only in snippets throughout the novel is Billy Barber, who eventually functions as a convenient deus ex machina to bring Jacob’s legal situation to an end. Of course, Billy Barber is a bad person because he a) is in prison, b) has the nickname “Bloody” and c) swears a lot. He is one long greasy handlebar mustache away from being in a cartoon, and the narrative breaks apart whenever he appears.

Of course, these are not the only characters who inhabit the novel, but even the others tend to fall too easily into stereotypes: Barber’s boss, Lynn Canavan, is a heartless political office seeker. Neal Logiudice, who prosecutes Jacob, is Barber’s former mentee now turned against his master, and so on.

Yet, there are moments where the characters stop resembling chess pieces, existing solely to propel Landay’s narrative, and actually start to breathe on their own. These moments surround Barber’s family: Jacob, of course, and Laurie, the wife and mother. In these moments, the reader receives a glimpse of what could have been: a close examination of a family breaking apart under the pressure of the legal system and its often indecipherable machinations.

Unfortunately, these moments are too few, and the scarcity of this examination of the strain — think “Mystic River” — robs the well-written finale of its intended impact.