'The Confession' by Robert Dugoni Book Review

          The jury is back and the verdict is unanimous. Robert Dugoni is not the ‘next’ anyone in legal thrillers, he’s the new standard against which others will now be judged. If Murder One was his Master’s thesis, then his latest David Sloane thriller, The Conviction, is his PhD; a dissertation in deception.

Sloane, the lawyer that never loses, finds himself reliving a horror from his recent past through the behavior of his step-son, who is suffering his own crisis of self-destruction brought on by witnessing his mother’s brutal murder and coming perilously close to his own. In a last ditch effort to reconnect—and keep Jake out of jail—Sloane accepts an invitation to go camping with an old friend and his son.

Jake, reluctantly followed by the younger boy, runs afoul of local law enforcement in a small town in California’s Gold Country. Whisked away, tried and convicted in a kangaroo court, the boys find themselves on the way to a juvenile detention center from Hell before the dads fully realize they are missing.

          Now, the law Sloane has manipulated to his advantage for so long, becomes a ponderous impediment, and he must decide if he can do whatever it takes—legal or not—to rescue the boys before time runs out.

          The Conviction, due out June 12^th from Touchstone, is a taut, riveting Tilt-A-Wheel ride that builds to a white-knuckle climax for readers. Dugoni is fully in command of his craft and does not disappoint. This book makes a compelling case that Robert Dugoni deserves a place atop the bestseller throne. All hail the new King of legal thrillers!

Robert Dugoni

The Conviction   ISBN: 978-1-4516-0672-0

Touchstone  Due for release June 12, 2012

R L Pace received an advance copy of this book, gratis, for review purposes, but purchased a pre-release copy at full price before reading ‘The Confession’ or writing this review.

In Defense of Arts

Try, for a moment, to imagine a world without music. Okay, that's unfair, you say, and almost impossible. Fine, let's try an easier one: Conjure up what life might be without literature. How drab an existence without the Bible or Shakespeare, Keats, Synge, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen or Anton Chekov. Dickens reduced to writing pamphlets for patent medicines. Jules Verne never creates Captain Nemo or the Nautilaus. Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics never enter the vernacular. Dracula never meets Frankenstein in the movies. Inconceivable.

Let's pile on and strip away visual arts. Painting now consists of covering every surface with the same shade of gray. There are no statues, because there are no carvers to hew away the unnecessary bits of stone to reveal an inspiration.
All buildings are square. There is one font in your word program. All cars look the same (alright, bad example).

The point here is obvious. There is no modern civilization without the arts--all of them--and yet, whenever times are tough and education budgets are stretched past the breaking point, the razor sharp knives of the politicians know just what they want to slash; the arts.

Nationwide, schools eviscerate music, art and drama programs routinely. It's harder to slice away at English, but not so difficult to manipulate what is taught. Locally these cuts are seldom made because a majority wishes the programs gone, but instead because rules imposed from afar reward test scores, not learning. This ill-conceived, slavish devotion to better math and science rankings misses the bigger picture. The arts inform the sciences.

Music education does more than teach tunes. It conveys rhythm, structure, discipline and abstract thinking. It's learning an entirely new language, complete with its own special set of symbols, rules and nuances.

Visual arts satisfy that urge to comprehend and understand what we see around us. A sense of space, color and even time. An urge as ancient as the paintings in the caves of Lascaux, an opportunity to say to future generation "I was here and this is how I saw the world".

The engineers and astronauts that took us to the moon, invented computers and cell phones, created Teflon and Tang and freeze-dried ice cream were not novelists or writers of fiction. But they were inspired to make real the science fiction fantasies they surreptitiously read with a flashlight beneath their bed covers as children.

Authors like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula LeGuin and Ray Bradbury stoked the fires of imagination, and when that was coupled to the broader world of math and reading and science, the synergy opened floodgates of practical accomplishment.
A world without the arts is a barren place, and we suffer not just the loss of our unique culture and the essence of being human, but the very tools some think should be the only skills taught. The subtraction of one is the erosion of the other. We need to encourage, expand and value arts education because it serves the entire community and lifts us all, technician or dreamer.

In truth, the great leaps in science and technology have always been partnered with starry-eyed visionaries--in the arts--showing us what might yet be.