Abandoned Heart: a Novel of Suspense

At first, it looks like the system is working, when 16-year-old former junkie Donna Alvarez becomes foster child to Kate O'Dwyer, who has recently relocated to Scottsdale, Ariz., with her three-year-old daughter, Jennifer, following a quickie annulment. But in his relentlessly grim and high-minded fourth legal thriller (after Nothing But the Truth), Parrish skewers the entire justice system, indicting liberal policies that allow the guilty to walk while damning conservative biases that favor the privileged. When Donna's ex-pimp finds business deteriorating, he hooks her on heroin again and sells her to two men for the night--one of them a ""respectable"" lawyer, who also rapes Jennifer. When early tests reveal that Jennifer may have been infected with HIV, Kate turns for comfort to Mike Fallon, a hungry lawyer who, having just recently passed the bar, finds himself forced to take whatever unsavory cases come along. This reads like a thinly veiled polemic against the suppression of questionably obtained evidence as the beleaguered Kate undergoes more reversals of fortune than Claus von Bulow. With the legal system and her church letting her down, a bleak picture is sketched of a not-too-distant future, where more and more individuals will take vengeance into their own hands. There's plenty to chew on here, but Parrish frequently aims too high; the religious overtones are particularly heavy-handed. Amazingly, however, the reader keeps turning the pages, anxiously looking to see if some semblance of justice--and whose--will finally prevail. (July)