The Night Lawyer [Mass Market Paperback]

Michelle Spring deserves her reputation as a topnotch writer of psychological suspense (In the Midnight Hour, Nights in White Satin.) She goes full throttle again to deliver chills and nail biting tension with The Night Lawyer.

Ellie Porter is a young woman struggling to put her life back in order following a nervous breakdown. Abandonment by her married lover was the major cause of her illness, although she is also haunted by the murder of her father some twenty years ago. Slightly built she is blessed with long, curly reddish gold hair, and an eye catching figure. ""Though Ellie's scarcely aware of it, heads turn and grown men weaken when she shrugs off a shawl to reveal a well-cut black dress and a decolletage to die for."

She's pays scant attention to her assets as she concentrates on regaining mental health. Her mother, Anabel, is of little help, rather the opposite constantly harping on Ellie's weight gain, nagging that she'll never attract another man. That's the last thing Ellie wants. She turns to karate to boost her self-confidence, and in order to practice during the day she takes a night job.

This is not just any job, she's a night lawyer with London's Chronicle newspaper. She's the one responsible for catching anything that might be cause for legal action against the paper. Ellie's the Chronicle's only night lawyer, and she works alone.

She seems well on the road to recovery when her tranquility at home is interrupted by sounds coming through the wall from next door. It is Jessica, a young neighbor with a bent for self-mutilation, and Jessica's boyfriend, Tull, who has an aversion to honest labor. Almost against her will we see soft-hearted Ellie becoming involved in the young woman's troubled life.

That is but one drama that intrudes upon her world - Ellie believes she is being watched, stalked, and she is. Someone follows her in the dark of night when she leaves work. Who and why?

British author Spring richly evokes London, the Isle of Dogs, the Docklands. Her setting is described not only with telling detail but with affection. For this reader Ellie's character was not presented as clearly, yet suspense is well crafted as it moves, albeit slowly, to a startling finish.

- Gail Cooke

I am a fan of the Laura Principal series, featuring the feisty, feminist private investigator, Laura Principal. They are notable for - amongst other things - contrasting the privileges of the old Cambridge colleges with the seedier ends of the city. She conjures a parallel universe where sex-workers off Mill Road have to earn their living while the gilded youth can enjoy oysters and champagne at a May Ball.

Her fifth book is a departure from the series and presents us with an entirely new and more vulnerable protagonist. After a breakdown, Ellie Porter gets a job as the night lawyer on a tabloid; her role is to oversee and sign off articles she has checking for potential libel suits. In this novel, the twinned sides of Cambridge are replaced by the upmarket/downmarket of Canary Wharf/Isle of Dogs. In an era of surveillance, CTC cameras charting every move, Ellie, has a sense, not of security, but of stalking.

Once again, Spring's acute sense of social divides (and where they unexpectedly connect), plus her gift for creating atmospheric cityscapes, are part of the pleasures of the book. Structurally - and psychologically - it is an exploration of damage on a variety of levels - damage suffered by a powerless child, as well as damage suffered by a whole social class. Despite powerful invocations of threat and fear, it is also a novel of recovery. The possibility of recuperation is never entirely defeated.

Having started to read it, I could not put it down. Highly recommended.

Pam Hirsch

Review of The Night Lawyer, by Michelle Spring

Random House, 2006

Rarely does a novel do so much to capture the visceral as well as the

visual energy of both a place and state of being, than does Michelle

Spring's new novel, The Night Lawyer. The book offers up an experience

of East London and its towering financial centre at Canary Wharf,

imposed against a night snapshot of a city in a moment in time: in stark

contrast to the last few remaining rows of Victorian workers cottages,

abandoned shipyards and dock warehouses of the Isle of Dogs. It

describes the social and architectural discrepancies of rich and poor,

stainless steel and old wood, imported marble and muddy footpaths, all

bound together by the energy of the people who live in the Thames

Gateway, and who travel in and out via the DLR (Docklands Light

Railway), which connects this urban but remote eastern waterway area to

the city of London, and the world beyond.

The language of the novel is at once sparse and elegant- evoking the

simplicity and stunning chiaroscuro of a skyline at night, where the

unseen facets of cranes, towers, and plumes of smoke fuse above and put

into perspective the toiling of people on the ground.

Yet all this, rich as it is, is merely the backdrop for the story of a

remarkable young woman: Eleanor Porter, the night lawyer hired to do

the lonely late night shift at a tabloid newspaper- a dangerous job in

more ways than one, but the right job to test the mettle of a woman

newly returned to work and life after a serious breakdown.

Like the Docklands of the novel's setting, the main character is

herself a set of contradictions that flow into a solid whole. Eleanor,

or Ellie, is petite, but strong. She twirls like a dancer but also

kicks with the best in her karate club. She has learned how to live

alone, how to keep her space simple and clean, without the clutter of

domestic objects, but with easy to follow walls and boundaries. She

lives alone but has an empathy for others that takes her, against her

will and better judgment, out by foot through the winding streets and

canals and between the wealth of her office tower and the mixed economy

of her new neighborhood. She stands up to the hooded youths who hang

around menacing along her street, and traverses the great divide of her

own safe garden wall to help the young neighbor girl whose boyfriend

contributes to both women's senses of uncertainty in a hard world.

The Night Lawyer is the story of a woman who comes to terms with the

process of being stalked, and who does so alone. The police do not

help, the neighbors do not help, the office colleagues who try to help

fail to understand the magnitude of the problem. Ellie helps herself.

Her story is one of the transformative female experience of emerging

from victimhood to survivor. Her is also the story of emancipation from

the burden of deep memory of abuse, unearthed by the stirrings of a

photograph, brought to her attention by a shadowy figure encountered

too close to home.

What is striking about Ellie, and the novel as a whole, is the energy

that the story drives ahead. Eleanor is edgy: she makes some bad

choices as well as some good ones, acts uncertainly and unstably when

faced with unexpected danger, and finds it difficult to trust the

social systems that are meant to protect her. This makes her a

realistic character for our modern age, when social systems are

breaking down and the edges of the 'urban regeneration' areas express an

uncanny mixture of possibility and the end of certainty.

Without wishing to give the story away, I would simply say that readers

of many ages, women and men alike, will find in this book an accurate,

energised and uneasy description of an urban area in the process of

change, and of a woman who learns to live within that process of change.

This story is ripe for dramatisation, either in film or perhaps in TV

serialisation, for surely there are many more stories cases to be

solved and resolved by this night lawyer, in a world that 'never

sleeps'. This reader is very much looking forward to Ellie Porter's

next encounter. . .