Book Talk: Levine, ‘Kill All the Lawyers’

“Kill All the Lawyers” (2006, 352 pages) is the third offering in Paul Levine’s “Solomon vs. Lord” series, possibly a homage to the 1985-89 TV series “Moonlighting.” As in the previous two books, law partners Steve Solomon (marginally Jewish, a graduate in the top twenty percent of the bottom one-third of his class in a Florida law school, and a lawyer who passed the Bar Exam on his third attempt) and Victoria Lord (possibly Episcopalian-Presbyterian, maybe shoe-in for membership in the DAR, and a cum laude graduate of the Ivy League who longs for respectability and recognition as the competent attorney that she is) sustain their performance of “Men Are from Mars; Women Are from Venus” in this humorous, yet somewhat dark mystery.

As the novel opens, Steve awakes one morning to find a 300-pound marlin harpooned to his front door. Other unexplainable things occur until Steve learns that Dr. Wiliam Kreeger has been released, after having served six years in prison. Before he was incarcerated, Kreeger had been represented by Steve, but when the defense attorney became convinced that his client was a psychopathic killer, he revealed important information to the prosecution, resulting in a verdict of manslaughter.

Now, Kreeger, a narcissist with a genius I.Q. and a license to practice psychiatry, intends to get even. He uses his “Dr. Bill” radio program to defame Steve and goad him into engaging in acts that substantiate Kreeger’s claim that Steve is an unstable person with dangerous potential. In fact, Dr. Bill argues that the urge to commit murder is atavistic, ingrained in everyone’s DNA and actionable under the right circumstances. He asks, “Wouldn’t any of us kill in order to protect someone we love?”