The Judgement

By D.W. Buffa

Warner Books; $24.95; 0-446-52737-8; May 22, 2001, 418 pages (galley copy)

      When a dictatorial, mean-spirited Portland judge is found murdered next to his car in a parking garage, a set of mixed emotions surfaces in the mind of attorney Joseph Antonelli. After all, the evil judge had once sent him to jail for contempt and later ruined the life of a once promising young lawyer whom Antonelli had mentored. But when the alleged killer is caught, confesses and subsequently commits suicide in his cell, Antonelli, along with a decent cop on the case, smells a rat.
      When yet another judge is found killed in the same place and same manner, Antonelli decides to do some sleuthing on his own. He agrees to represent the suspect in the second murder, a mentally disabled street person. Descrepancies in both murder investigations begin to mount, and solving the case becomes a passion for Antonelli.
      The story begins compellingly enough -- D.W. Buffa writes with confidence and not a little flair. We take to Antonelli as a protagonist right off, because he operates within the traditional moral universe of the best detectives: unconsciously antiauthoritarian, a defender of the weak and poor and imbued with an assertive independent approach to life. But as the plot unfolds, instead of building suspense, Buffa constantly halts the action for long stretches of dialog, often superfluous to the story line. He digresses here, rambles there, frustrating the reader with fits and starts. Credibility also becomes a problem. While we expect to suspend the semblance of reality when absorbed in a crime novel, it's still necessary to have what happens in the characters lives seem realist dic.
      When Antonelli goes "underground" to a homeless encampment after a couple days of not shaving, it's hard to fathom how none of the colleagues he encounters recognize him. It is true the homeless can seem invisible, but here the point seems labored. Also disrupting the flow of the narrative (in the first person) is the rekindling of romance with a woman from Antonelli's distant past. The whole encounter feels too good to be true, too wonderful to last and sure enough, we see the cracks in the love affair long before Antonelli does.
      Though set in Portland, the city is only perfunctorily described or utilized - it rains a lot, and a trip up the Columbia River Gorge are about as Portland as it gets.
      Buffa does turn a phrase with the best, however, and much of the pleasure in The Judgment comes from his de Cscriptive prose. When Antonelli is interviewing a key character, confined to a mental hospital for the criminally insane, he is taken aback by the intensity in the man's eyes: "The look he gave me was uncanny. While his eyes bored in on me, trying to reach the back of my skull, they seemed at the same time to dart all around. It was like watching a solar eclipse. In the middle of was a deep dark, impenetrable point, that for the moment at least stayed fixed, surrounded by a dazzling fireworks of dancing, flying light."
      If The Judgment were read solely as a series of deftly crafted character studies, the story would be both engaging and amusingly quirky. As a thriller, though, it never catches fire and by the time Buffa wraps it all up, the reader has been at the finish line long before either author or detective.