Burden Of Turow

TITLES: FAMILIAR LEGAL TERMS

PUBLISHERS: TOO MANY OF THEM

AUTHORS: LAWYERS ON THEIR LUNCH HOURS

THE BOTTOM LINE: Is your mouthpiece taking notes to keep you out of jail or to put you in Chapter 6?

All rise. Let it be stipulated that George V. Higgins (Defending Billy Ryan, Kennedy for the Defense) writes about rascally lawyers better than any other novelist now at large.

Without objection, so entered. But the matter before the court is not the literary standing of the estimable Higgins. It is a spreading gray ooze of lesser lawyer novels with indistinguishable titles, written perhaps for love, perhaps for glory, but probably to capitalize on the dumbfounding popularity of lawyer novels by Scott Turow (The Burden of Proof, Presumed Innocent) and John Grisham (The Firm, The Pelican Brief).

Why is jurisprudence suddenly the hot new pop read? The U.S. does have more lawyers, many no doubt underemployed and hungry, than anyplace else in the universe. Probably, however, we have more accountants and termite exterminators as well, and they remain decently silent. Anyway, this year lawyers, next year civil engineers or professional bowlers. Or a heartwarming resurgence of doctor-nurse romances. In any case, the entire, ever wistful publishing industry now chases riches through barratry, the offense of excessive litigation. There is a cranked-out feel to most legal thrillers. Virtually all are blurbed as the work of the next Turow, which may not be an endorsement, since Turow's plodding prose can be a way not of passing time but doing it. Still, a few lawyer novels pass minimal standards as survival gear. For the next time you're sentenced to 7 to 10 years between planes at O'Hare, here's a sampling of legal thrillers:

Mitigating Circumstances (Dutton; $20), by Nancy Taylor Rosenberg, needs some mitigating by an editor. Or maybe not; the prose is so purple it's golden. An aerobic love passage ends with the heroine, an assistant prosecutor named Lily Forrester, hyperventilating as follows: "Her body was screaming at her, begging her, demanding more. Perhaps she could actually feed this desire, this need." A lawyer's body wouldn't really carry on this way, would it?

Forrester has other problems. A career thug attacks her and rapes her teenage daughter. Not very believably, she tracks him down and shoots him, bang-bang. Melodrama ripens as a shrewd cop attached to her department reports his progress in tracking down the killer, who of course is Lily herself. Will he turn her in? Not before he chews some scenery: "I am the law. Not the judges on their high benches too far from it to even smell it. I'm the one who gets shot at. The one who has to inhale the rotting flesh of the society we live in . . . There is a god, lady, and he lives down here in the gutter with the likes of me." Right, Officer.

Regardless of locale, most lawyer novels are easterns, in which the court system is a semicorrupt mess but the heroic judge/prosecutor/defense attorney finds the loophole that achieves justice. This one is a horseless, string-'em- up western whose message is that black hats are felonizing homesteaders and courts are run by sociobabbling liberals. Come back, Shane.