Death Qualified (A Barbara Holloway Novel Book 1) by Kate Wilhelm

 

   

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Mystery
Content: Strong language, off page sex

 

Lucas Kendrick appears at his estranged wife’s home after a mysterious seven-year disappearance, and is instantly shot. Nell Kendrick, charged with his murder, calls Attorney Frank Holloway to defend her. But Frank cannot prepare her defense alone. He needs a lawyer who is “death qualified”—able to defend capital cases. He appeals to his daughter Barbara, who, out of disillusionment with a profession prizing politics over justice, abandoned her practice five years before. Reluctantly, Barbara is plunged into a case involving chaos theory, the mysterious death of a researcher, and a politically motivated and hostile prosecutor. To complicate matters, Barbara falls in love with a mathematician whose help she seeks in unraveling the case.

I recently started buddy reading this book with a couple of friends on Goodreads and I've been enjoying it quite a bit. I'm now on the third book in the series. What I like about these is the father daughter dynamic between Barbara and Frank. They are both attorneys and they collaborate on the cases. They both have their flaws and they don't always get along, but there is a mutual respect there and I like the dialog between them.

Another thing I really like about this series are the courtroom scenes. There are always interesting things learned in these chapters about how trials are conducted and how things can be perceived and manipulated during trials. Certain aspects of the series—the courtroom drama and the investigations—remind me a great deal of Perry Mason.

I've been listening to these since the audio for the whole series is on Hoopla and I really like the narrator. I can totally picture that voice being Barbara's. The narrator also does a pretty good job with the other character voices, especially Frank.

This is a long series with 14 books, so I will probably not review every book in the series, but just the ones that make the most impression on me. As for this book in particular, I liked the overall plot, even though the whole psychological experimentation thing was a little hard to believe at times, and I had issues with some things about the ending. I liked the characters and everything else enough to want to keep reading.