James Woolf
Bloodhound, 2024
James Woolf is a former colleague of mine. He used to advise barristers on professional ethics. It was a pleasure to read his debut novel about a criminal barrister who gets into very hot water ethically.
The book is partly about love and relationships, part courtroom drama, part thriller.
It took a while to get to the courtroom scenes, but from then on it was difficult to put the book down.
Before we got to the exciting part there were lots of characters to be introduced to – too often in scenes over meals discussing their food. And, each chapter heading has a date (it is set from 1993 – 1996) and some chapters take you back in time. I’m a lazy reader, so I prefer to relax with fewer characters to learn and have everything chronological.
There are a few brief sex scenes in which the graphic detail was unnecessary. (I’m a P G Wodehouse fan, where, as Stephen Fry says, in those novels beds are only ever used for sleeping in, or hiding under!).
The barrister who is the main character is a fragile man, often clumsy in his relationships. When James writes dialogue of the family tensions, they feel uncomfortably realistic.
He has an enjoyable style of writing, with a good choice of phrase, e.g. “She’s all over you like a rash.” (Page 59).
I also enjoyed the vignette of an exaggerated, but true to life, observation of what happens when a committee meeting is poorly chaired:
“The first item on the agenda was the number of milk bottles being purchased each day for chambers. This proved to be a contentious item, as quite often entire pints had gone off in the fridge. On the other hand, there was nothing worse than working late in chambers and finding you couldn’t make yourself a hot drink […] It was an intractable problem and they talked about it for over forty minutes with feelings running high. The time taken on this subject combined with the late start meant that there was no time for the main item on the agenda, the plan to relocate chambers.” (Page 91-92).
In short, a good read, a thriller involving lawyers, but not the usual fake lawyers you usually encounter in legal dramas. This author knows his subject.
August 2024
Adrian Vincent