Needles

After finishing his first novel, Needles, the third book I’ve reviewed by William Deverell, there’s no doubt that he belongs on my ten-best list of crime novelists. He gives me the difficult challenge of trying to figure out who to kick off my crime novelist island. I promise to immediately download another one of his 16 published novels, Kill All the Lawyers.

Needles is a crime novel about the heroin trade in Vancouver, Canada. Foster Cobb is a trial lawyer who was recently left the prosecutor’s office to start his own defense firm, but he doesn’t have any work yet. Cobb has a sordid past, but he straightened out his own heroin problem, graduated from law school, and had a successful stint prosecuting criminals. After 13 years of being clean, he has just relapsed in the midst of the stress of his new practice and his failing marriage. Suddenly, he’s offered a case – to freelance for the prosecutor’s office in a case against a drug kingpin, Dr. Au. Dr. Au is one sick dude who dropped out of medical school and now treats those who betray him to a surgical castration. The story takes us from the origin of the drugs in Hong Kong to its distribution in Vancouver. The heroin drug trade is a very dangerous business.

Deverell is a master of character development, surrounding both Cobb and Dr. Au with a cast of believable supporting characters. And with Cobb’s marital trouble and partnering with a young female Asian lawyer, there’s a love interest as well. It’s also a story of multilevel betrayal, most of which caught me by surprise. This novel brings with it far more than a great plot and courtroom drama (that is second to none) because of Deverell’s description of the emotions with which his characters are struggling.

Regarding his previously reviewed books, I commented that Deverell wrote with knowledge about alcoholism, but now it’s clear that he also knows heroin addiction. Consider that this is a 1979 book and think about following paragraph: “Cobb knew the fundamental truth about junk, a truth all junkies keep in their hearts; once wired, you can never get free. You can stop using; you can lay the spike aside for years. But you’re never free. The wire keeps you hooked until the day of your death.” For a comment, I sent that paragraph to a friend of mine who has a distant history of heroin addiction, a person who has become a national figure in the sobriety movement, and she wrote back to me: “The landscape was much different in Cobb's time and that's why the tagline for NA is: the lie is dead. We do recover." That’s my perception, as well.

This was a fantastic story, and it gets my highest recommendation. Besides, you’ll learn a lot.