In Greg Iles’s new book, the title explains the wall of silence and resistance confronted by Houston prosecutor Penn Cage upon his return to his Mississippi hometown. He has returned to his roots with his young daughter after the agonizing cancer death of his wife. Penn reluctantly takes on a controversial 30-year-old civil rights case involving the bombing death of a black man, a thorny matter which the conservative Old South community would rather forget.

While residents attempt to convince Penn to let sleeping dogs lie and stonewall his push to re-open the Del Payton case, a visit by the victim’s family only bolsters Penn’s resolve to do something about the situation.

Moreover, Penn’s father, Tom, is being blackmailed by a dying jailbird who has a gun tying the older man to a murder, and the sinister demands for more money increase as Tom’s health declines. Penn’s friends and business associates advise him to leave, but he cannot because of his father’s predicament.

The doomed convict plans to take Tom down with him, claiming the murder weapon was a gun borrowed from the physician, that they were partners in the crime. The only solution to end the blackmailing may require Penn to break his strict ethical code.

Meanwhile, the pressure to stop Penn from bringing the Payton case to trial mounts, especially after a press interview given to Caitlin Masters, a newspaper publisher. Once Penn and Caitlin team up, the fireworks start with a host of obstacles thrown between them and the truth including the FBI, a tyrannical judge, the Natchez community, and an old flame with a score to settle. The action reaches a peak in the courtroom, when the resourceful Penn takes on the opposition for a bitter fight in which the truth cannot be denied.

Robert Fleming is a journalist in New York City.

Alan M. Dershowitz’s new novel Just Revenge confronts one of the most difficult questions of legal and moral theory: Is revenge ever justified? Although it never conclusively decides this question, the novel does take the reader through a labyrinth of horror, obsession, legal wrangling and ultimately reconciliation.

Just Revenge features a Holocaust survivor and professor of religion, Max Menuchen, who has discovered the man who, half a century before in war-torn Lithuania, killed his family as he watched. The mild-mannered professor has never before broken a law, but his discovery of Marcellus Prandus, the Lithuanian militia captain who carried out the anti-Jewish orders of the Nazis, leads him to seek proportional justice.

Rather than simply killing Prandus, who is dying of cancer anyway, Menuchen wants to make him feel what it is like to see his whole family die before his eyes. Menuchen’s revenge is gruesome but, as the result of several twists and turns, not quite what you may expect.

The first half of the novel follows Menuchen’s enactment of revenge, and the second half deals with the legal repercussions and the courtroom drama which follow this act. Menuchen is defended in court by Abe Ringel, a defense lawyer who is known for defending controversial accused criminals. The courtroom scenes have a few of their own twists, including a surprise witness and a dramatic and unexpected turn at the end of the long trial.

A professor at Harvard Law School and one of the most famous criminal defense lawyers in the country, Dershowitz demonstrates in this, his second novel, a broad intellectual scope and a deep understanding of legal and ethical complexity.

Vivian Wagner is a freelance writer in New Concord, Ohio.

The world of Colin Harrison’s new novel, Afterburn, is a world of dark extremes. Unrelentingly corrupt, its characters oscillate between cynicism and melancholy. Their violent acts are dispassionate; their passionate couplings verge on violence. The tangled plot begins with the capture and torture of fighter pilot Charlie Ravich by the Viet Cong in 1972. Charlie withstands starvation, beatings, and incoherence, only to be riddled with friendly fire just prior to his rescue. But he survives, and the narrative leaps ahead to 1999, where Charlie has become a successful international businessman. On a trip to Hong Kong, he witnesses a death that makes him a very wealthy man. But wealth only assuages Charlie’s physical and emotional pain. His wife seems to be slipping away to what may be Alzheimer’s, his only son died years before. So, when Charlie learns that his daughter is unable to bear a child, he takes steps to assure his own genetic immortality by advertising for a woman to bear his child. At the same time, a mathematical whiz named Christina Welles is freed unexpectedly from prison, where she has been serving a sentence for trafficking stolen goods. Christina suspects that her early release has been orchestrated by Tony Verducci, the mobster she has betrayed. Sure that Tony wants to exact some form of revenge, Christina lays low in Manhattan, assuming the name of another woman. Her old boyfriend, Rick Bocca, is warned by the cops that Christina is out of prison and the target of Tony’s vendetta. Still in love with her, and feeling guilty for her incarceration, he goes in search of her, not realizing that his hunt is endangering Christina as well as himself.

When Christina hooks up with Charlie Ravich in the bar of the Pierre, Charlie is fascinated by this clever, attractive woman. They become lovers, and Charlie, knowing nothing of her past, speculates that she might be the ideal woman to bear his child. But once his and Christina’s worlds collide, Charlie quickly becomes the unwitting target of Tony’s pitiless wrath. With ingenious plot turns reminiscent of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters, the truth is slowly revealed about Christina’s inventive deception of Tony. With its muscular prose and graphic depictions of a nefarious world, Afterburn is clearly not a book for faint-hearted readers. But for those who can steer through the raging sex and violence, Colin Harrison will reward them with a compelling story fueled by lots of surprises, including two kickers at the end. ¦ Robert Weibezahl is the co-author of A Taste of Murder (Dell).

Best-selling author Charles Wilson has taken the axiom that knowledge is power to its ultimate limit in his tenth thriller and hardcover debut, Game Plan, in which he builds on research exploring the role of electrical energy in powering the human brain. Recent studies have demonstrated that minute electrical charges can stimulate the brain’s distinction between light and dark in the absence of optical nerves. The military has given such research a high priority because of its potential for improving human performance on the battlefield. In Game Plan, a defense research project that involves enhancing human intelligence demands the greatest secrecy; huge amounts of data are inscribed on microchips which are then implanted in test subjects’ brains to expand their knowledge and memory, and enhance their body strength and coordination. Subjects are recruited from the military’s prison population with the promise of eventual parole. Five hardened criminals are able to apply their newly gained intelligence to break out of the research facility, destroy all the project’s records, and assume new identities. The five succeed not only in becoming wealthy and influential, but also in continuing the research project. Their plans take a sudden turn, however, and a chain of events is set off, ending in the death of a pathologist. Enter Dr. Spence Stevens, the protege of the murdered pathologist. When he decides to investigate the homicide of his mentor, worlds collide and knowledge becomes power.

Like each of his earlier techno-thrillers, Wilson’s Game Plan reaches over the horizon just far enough to create real plausibility and telegraphs another potential path for today’s research. Wilson has dealt his readers another intriguing card; let’s hope there are many more in his deck.

John Messer once served in the Pentagon.