Shades of Justice

Gwen Parrish, the cynical antiheroine and narrator of this disastrous legal thriller, tries the reader's patience from page one. We meet her in bed with the husband of her best friend, Willette Rormier--except Gwen doesn't have any friends. An African American attorney working in Houston, Gwen, determined to become a judge, is sucking up to Willette's father, kingmaker Willie Shalandar. After Willie is murdered, McKeever-Bullard involves Gwen; her boyfriend Dirk Ingersoll (a white Legal Aid lawyer); her teenaged daughter, Ashleigh Lee; and Black Power activist ex-husband Kwame Nkrumah El'Kasid in a plot so ludicrous that it defies summary. Suffice it to say that Gwen inexplicably marries Dirk (""aka Mundane Man""), whom she can't stand, and is appointed special prosecutor in charge of the murder case--opposite sexy firebrand Kwame, who is meanwhile suing for custody of Ashleigh Lee. Along the way, half the characters turn out to be psychopaths; an aspiring politician hides an incestuous pregnancy and commits infanticide in a toilet; a drug-addicted judge is brought down by her lesbian nymphomania; and mundane Dirk is revealed to be not just a Republican (presumably a rare bird in his line of work) but a violent, ""nigger""-screaming racist. Sad to say, the ""sympathetic"" characters, Kwame and Ashleigh Lee, are hardly more enlightened in matters of race, and Gwen is an unreflecting homophobe. Readers might suspect McKeever-Bullard of hiding ultra-noir parody under the glib histrionic girl-talk of her prose, but a fairy-tale ending reveals the shallowness of this unintentionally creepy debut. (Aug.)