Mackerel by Moonlight

New York, NY, U.S.A.: Simon & Schuster Trade, 1998. First Printing . Hard Back. Very Good/Near Fine. 6" x 9 1/2. 238 pages. Publishers staff reading copy label on front of dust jacket and promotional letter laid in. I recognized this gambit immediately. It was the old Abe Fortas trick: define the issue so that you and the judge--in this case, the voter--are on one side, and everyone else is on the other side, especially opposing counsel or the opposing candidate, says Terry Mullally, a former prosecutor from Brooklyn now running for district attorney in Boston. When Fortas was in private practice, he drove his adversaries crazy by persuading the judge that he wasn't an advocate for his client at all, he was just trying to help the court. The more his opponent protested, the more the opponent looked like a shrill partisan who couldn't be trusted to give the judge reliable information. Shrewd, sharply observed inside nuances like that light up almost every page of this debut legal thriller by William F. Weld, the former federal prosecutor and two-term Governor of Massachusetts who never got to be President Clinton's Ambassador to Mexico because of Jesse Helms's determined opposition. Mullally--an orphan virtually raised by cops after his father's death--is a fascinatingly flawed hero for our time, determined to do good even if it means bending the law. He's helped by a fine gallery of supporting players, including an old sportswriter brought in to Bostonize the candidate by insisting he say things like So isn't Murphy instead of So is Murphy.