Legal Briefs: Short Stories by Today's Best Thriller Writers

What makes a good legal thriller tick--the slow accretion of details, the teasing plot twists, the gradual unveiling of character, the bracing mind games--is not, as a rule, the stuff of short stories. For this reason, it comes as no surprise that many of these 11 stories, while diverting, are punchline-driven. Jay Brandon's ""Stairwell Justice,"" for instance, concludes preposterously when a prosecutor flees to a tropical island with a seductive defendant. Even the darker tales end cutely (and is there a reader even casually versed in noir fiction who won't suspect that the sadsack lawyer in Grif Stockley's ""The Divorce"" is being hoodwinked by his gorgeous ""size 5"" client?). Two stories are notably subpar: John Grisham's maudlin four-pager about a ""good doctor"" destroyed by an act of malpractice, and Steven Martini's extremely broad satire about a shady lawyer felled by his evil twin, President Clinton. Martini alternates between unfunny prose and embarrassing doggerel: ""Way down in that murky depth/ A serious streak of dishonesty crept""). There are only a few pleasures to be had here: Richard North Patterson's ""The Client"" is a lovely, hushed character study of an elderly mentor ushering a recent law-school grad into ""his world, as rare and special as a daguerreotype""; and Phillip Friedman's ""Roads,"" about a death-row attorney, resonates beyond the (literally) bang-up conclusion. (June)