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Class warfare
REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD
By Julian Fellowes Audio Renaissance, $39.95 10.5 hours unabridged, CD, ISBN 1593976143
A matter of life and death
By Richard North Patterson Random House Audio, $44.95 17 hours unabridged, CD, ISBN 0739301357
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Snobs is an irresistible audio presentation; its witty, scathingly accurate skewering of the higher echelons of British society becoming ever so more delightful when delivered in the smooth, honeyed accents of a real Brit, Richard Morant, who knows the territory. But it is debut novelist Julian Fellowes, whose debut screenplay was Gosford Park, we must thank for this romp through the intricacies of belonging and longing to belong, of inherited privilege and acquired privilege (never the same, darling) and the crystal ceiling that separates upper class from upper middle class. Fellowes has a flawless eye for detail and an ear for dialogue and seems to be writing with a razor-sharp social scalpel. Snobs is a delicious tale of social climbing and the inevitable pitfalls and pratfalls therein, filled with cleverly drawn characters: the lovely, porcelain-skinned but not upper-class Edith; the dull but likable Charles, the Earl Broughton, heir to a great fortune and Edith's ticket to a title; his mother, the elegant, socially expert, utterly confident, stand-by-your-son Lady Uckfield; and the drop-dead handsome actor who muddied the waters but didn't sink the ship.
Richard North Patterson's legal thrillers are among the very best in a very crowded genre and Conviction, his latest, is surely one of his best. Here are the bare bones—two African-American brothers, on death row for 15 years, were convicted of the murder and heinous sexual assault of a nine-year-old girl. Just 59 days before Rennell, the younger brother—possibly retarded, brutally abused, wholly dependent on his smarter, crack-dealing brother—is to die by lethal injection, his case is taken up by San Francisco lawyer Terri Paget, a fierce opponent of the death penalty. As she works the case, Terri becomes convinced not only of Rennell's innocence, but that he's truly retarded and was framed by his brother's vile cohort. As we follow Terri's battle, much is revealed about our criminal justice system, the intricacies of appeal and the deep divide in the Supreme Court—whose thinly veiled justices jockey for power, often forgetting that this case involves a real man with a real life to lose. Patterson does all this with admirable restraint. There are no wild chases, no midnight-hour revelations; there's only the grim reality that merely being innocent may not be enough. Reader Patricia Kalember creates a voice and persona for each character—male, female, black and white—and does it with consummate compassion and understanding. This is a provocative and unsettling book that, I must admit, left me sobbing.