Grant of Immunity by Garret Holms

Garret Holms, in real life, is a former prosecuting attorney and is now a judge, and he brings his knowledge of the court system to life. This story, which takes place in Los Angeles, is graphic, brutal, and blunt. Grant of Immunity is a nonstop read. I was drawn into this drama very quickly as an early life mistake haunted Danny Hart for the rest of his life. Lonely and unsure of himself, having grown up in a dysfunctional family and then barely 15 years old, Danny was befriended by a 20-year-old he only knew as Snake. As a kid, he never knew Snake’s real name. Danny, unwittingly, became Snake’s accomplice in the murder of Sarah Collins. Be warned, this is deeply sick stuff that Holms writes about. After the murder, Snake told Danny that for insurance, that he had kept the knife that had Danny’s fingerprints on it, so if he told anyone else about the murder, Danny would go down too. Snake then disappeared from Danny’s life for the next 19 years.

Meanwhile, Danny managed his guilt and self-contempt by dedicating himself to his studies, becoming a young and successful prosecuting attorney, and then finally a well-respected judge. At 35, he was appointed to the Superior Court bench in Los Angeles, and two years later, as he was about to have to run a race for election, he encountered Snake once again. But now, Snake is an LA Patrol Sargent, Jake Babbage. He was the worst of rogue cops, finding people he thought needed to be exterminated, and then he found ways to do that. He seemed to have pulled the wool over the eyes of his colleagues because he was looked on as being a cop’s cop. Babbage had a fixation on the 21-year-old daughter of the woman he killed 19 years earlier, and he made himself known to Judge Hart in an attempt to set her up for a fate like the one her mother suffered. The Judge is stuck between a rock and a hard place, between Charybdis and Scylla.

Holms has been very successful in creating opposing forces. On one side, there is Snake and his defense attorney, the narcissistic and pathologically ambitious Doris Reynolds. They are easy to hate as they attempt to use each other to accomplish their own desired perverted ends. On the other side is Judge Hart, the investigating officer, William Fitzgerald, and the two children of the murdered woman, 24-year-old Sean Collins and his little sister who is Babbage’s new obsession, Erin Collins. It’s a good story with a satisfying end, although it was not an end that I could have predicted. This one gets my highest recommendation – it’s the sort of crime novel that we at Men Reading Books wait for and thrive on. It’s available now on Kindle, in paperback, and in audio format.