Saturday, February 10, 2007

A Novel Worth Reading: Damage Control

A new book by Robert Dugoni is Damage Control. I had an copy mailed to me and it's worth a read. Dugoni formerly was a litigator on the West Coast.

The protagonist is Dana Hill, a Seattle-based attorney at a big firm. She has the typical big firm pressures when in the span of a hundred pages she is told she has breast cancer; learns that her lawyer husband is cheating on her with a paralegal from his firm; and worse - and central to the book - finds out that her brother is killed during a home robbery. All this while tending to a young child. Her boss is as you can almost sense a Type A overweight heart-attack-in-the-making ogre who demands more and more from Hill.

It's a light read and fast moving. A number of the characters are a bit predictable, but that's a minor issue with me. You may be able to see the key plot twist several pages before it happens, but the author does a pretty decent job at keeping you entertained.

I'm an avid reader, and while I tend to stay away from books based in law, would recommend this one for the beach or the lake, or any short vacation. I raced through it in four days.