By David in TN
Last year, I reviewed Marcia Clark's first mystery novel, Guilt by Association.
A week ago, her second novel, Guilt by Degrees came out. As before, most white men are weak, corrupt, or outright criminals. The heroine, based on Clark herself, is the toughest prosecutor going. Her best friends are a white detective who is smarter and better than her male colleagues with a black boyfriend, and a black female prosecutor who is tough and smart.
"Funky, multiethnic downtown Los Angeles" is a wonderful place. Simi Valley is threatening, and full of skinheads.
The plot has a homeless man murdered, which ties in with the murder of an LAPD cop. Who cares? The plot is an absolute mess, aside from being implausible.
There are a few passages about the Special Trials Unit which Clark was in as a prosecutor. The protagonist complains that other prosecutors are jealous of Special Trials because they get the high profile cases.
The book has been out a week and at the moment the hardback edition is 16,605 at Amazon. On Saturday it was 10,932. Does this sound like a best-seller?
Nicholas Stix has previously mentioned the Fail Upward Syndrome. Marcia Clark had a modest record as an LA County Deputy D.A. when she got the O.J. Simpson case. When she lost the biggest case of her career with a universally panned performance, Clark received a $4.2 million book deal. [N.S.: Four-point-two million dollars, for someone who wasn’t a celebrity, and had no track record as a writer? I’d better tell my editors my price has just gone up.]
Since then, she's been a "legal expert" on TV and now has a contract to write mystery novels. The first had mediocre sales. The present book is sinking and she supposedly has a contract for a third. How does she do it?
N.S.: Feminists have tremendous power in the publishing world. Clark is a feminist, and as David demonstrated, she writes pc pap. Therefore, the feminists will help her, at the expense of their firms, and other, more promising writers.
Nothing so compelling as a double-threat, so give the Devil his due: Congrats, you're both a reactionary AND an idiot! I hate this personal-attack crap, but you reap what you sow--and from the looks of things, those "editors" to whom you refer are a figment of your bitter imagination. Good luck and God Bless.
ReplyDeleteThe passage below is from the paperback edition of Jeffrey Toobin's book on the O.J. Simpson trial, "The Run of His Life." The paperback had an afterword chapter on the civil trial in which Simpson lost a Wrongful Death lawsuit. Marcia Clark was compared to Daniel Petrocelli, the lead attorney for Ron Goldman's family:
ReplyDelete"Still, despite these inherent advantages, the civil trial also made clear that Petrocelli's team was simply a more skilled collection of attorneys than the one assembled by Gil Garcetti. Petrocelli's exhaustive preparation, combined with his crisp competence in the courtroom, made Darden and Clark look much diminished by comparison."
A week and four days after publication, the hardback edition is at 41,863 on Amazon.
ReplyDeleteThe last comment was by David In TN.
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