A review by lesserjoke
While Justice Sleeps by Stacey Abrams

3.0

A hokey but entertaining legal-political thriller, sort of halfway between John Grisham and Dan Brown. You have to really not think too hard about some of the developments here, beginning with the initial premise of a Supreme Court justice putting himself into a medical coma and leaving a series of obscure clues about a conspiracy for his law clerk, to whom he's awarded his power of attorney. I have a particularly difficult time accepting the pseudoscience of an experimental poison gas that can be targeted to kill off only members of a given ethnoreligious group, which hinges on a complete misunderstanding of the biological reality -- or lack thereof -- behind apparent racial divisions. Even for fiction of this general level of absurd implausibility, that feels like a step too far.

The main appeal of this title is of course that it's written by Georgia politician Stacey Abrams, the first novel that she's published under her own name (following a few romances going by the pseudonym Selena Montgomery). I love her work on voting rights and wish she had been able to win her governor's race, and it's a thrill to occasionally remember while reading just who came up with this story. On its own merits, though, there's not much to elevate it above the typical fare of this genre.

[Content warning for gun violence, drug abuse, and biomedical experimentation.]

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