Circuit

Author of the bestselling Tears for the Singer, Snodgrass here offers a diverting, fast-paced legal melodrama. The setting is the moon, where newfound industrial strength gives the frontier communities a chance to show independence from the Earth nations that established them. A leading constitutionalist and friend of the U.S. president, Justice Cabot Huntington is sent in to regain control. The stiff-necked judge looks forward to writing precedents for space law, but when his first decision leads to the death of Soviet miners he must reevaluate his position and acknowledge his own complicity in the deadly power struggle that comes to implicate both the Russian and American leaders in the miners' murders. Snodgrass's idealistic portrait of the spacers is appealingif broad and rather simpleand the protests against martial law, the courtroom theatrics and the spacegoing shootouts keep the action boiling. (April)