Standard Of Review: You Don't Need A Weatherman To Know The Bomb Maker's Son Is A Solid Legal Thriller

For readers out there who have read The Firm so many times their copies are dog-eared, The Bomb Maker’s Son will make for a fine new read, according to resident book reviewer Harry Graff.

At the risk of ending up on an FBI watch list, I have always viewed the history of United States Vietnam-era domestic terrorist groups as a fascinating and underreported aspect of U.S. history. In college, I read the excellent memoir Fugitive Days by Bill Ayers (for any FBI agents out there reading this column, it was assigned for a class; I did not decide to read it myself!), one of the most prominent members of the Vietnam era terrorist group the Weather Underground (and who Sarah Palin infamously accused President Obama of “palling around” with during the 2008 election). However, such Vietnam-era domestic terrorist groups – despite being an obvious source of drama – are underrepresented in fiction. Philip Roth’s masterpiece novel American Pastoral includes a Weather Underground-like group as a subplot, but it is certainly not at the heart of the novel. And in the 2012 film The Company You Keep (which I have admittedly never seen), Robert Redford plays a former Weather Underground militant, but that movie made very little money (for a great film about a modern (as opposed to Vietnam-era) domestic terrorist group, watch the 2013 film The East). Attorney-author Robert Rotstein tries to reverse that trend in his new legal thriller novel The Bomb Maker’s Son, which revolves around a present-day criminal trial of a former Vietnam-era domestic terrorist.

The protagonist of The Bomb Maker’s Son is Parker Stern, a former child star turned Los Angeles attorney who, ironically enough, suffers from crippling stage fright, causing him to struggle in the courtroom. As the novel opens, Parker is visited by his estranged mother Harriet, who is a higher-up at the Church of the Sanctified Assembly, a Scientology-esque cult. Harriet implores Parket to take the case of Ian Holzner, accused of being the “Playa Delta Bomber” and killing four people with a bomb at a Veterans Affairs office in 1975. Holzner was part of the uncreatively named “Holzner-O’Brien Gang” (seriously, the Weather Underground was named after a line in Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” so the Holzner-O’Brien Gang couldn’t have named themselves after a lyric by at least, say, The Archies?), a domestic terrorist group similar to the Weather Underground. Holzner has been on the lam for almost forty years but has decided to turn himself in and stand trial. Holzner admits that he made numerous bombs for his “Gang” but swears his innocence with respect to this particular bombing. While Parker initially turns down the case, he changes his mind after Harriet reveals that Holzner is Parker’s long-lost father.

As Parker prepares for the trial with the help of his sometimes lover Lovely Diamond (yes, that is her real name; while I enjoyed this novel, I don’t think character names are Rotstein’s forte), he learns of the secret life Holzner led for forty years, living as a working-class mechanic and siring two children who were unaware of their father’s true identity. However, as the trial begins, someone bombs the federal courthouse, and Parker begins to suspect that either Holzner or one of his former Gang members is still active.

Parker is a perfectly fine protagonist, if unspectacular and a little vanilla. His background as a child actor and his suffering from glossophobia are interesting little character touches, but they ultimately had little relevance to the actual story.

Unsurprisingly, Holzner is a much more interesting character. In one of the best scenes of the novel, Holzner discusses his contempt for the proletariat life that he was forced to lead after he went into hiding, and his sadness that he had to hide his true beliefs about the United States government from his children. To make matters worse for Holzner, his son Dylan joined the military after September 11 and was killed in Afghanistan, fighting for a country that Holzner abhorred. Holzner’s struggle to maintain his anti-American ethos in a changing world is well developed by Rotstein.

Ultimately, legal thrillers inevitably rise and fall with their plots, and I think that Rotstein did an excellent job plotting an engrossing story. Many members of the Gang and its associates are still alive, and Parker never truly knows their agenda, or which of them may be secretly working with or against Holzner. There are numerous twists towards the novel that I admittedly did not see coming (and I am normally very skilled at foreseeing plot twists).

Even though I often nitpick the legal aspects of the movies, shows, and books I review, I thought Rotstein did a solid job portraying the actual trial (with the caveat that I am not a criminal attorney), which (with the one exception below) seemed realistic. I appreciated that the dialogue between the attorneys and the judge included discussion of real cases; most works of legal fiction eschew this level of detail, even famous criminal cases like Brady v. Maryland.

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Rotstein’s one true misstep is the octogenarian judge that oversees the trial, who seemed way too quirky and idiosyncratic for a federal judge, including inserting random Spanish words and phrases into his everyday speech. In one scene, the judge denies Parker’s motion on the spot because Parker’s private investigator (who had previously been an attorney and had represented the eponymous O’Brien of the Holzner-O’Brien Gang (to my chagrin, this O’Brien was not the same character as in the classic Seinfeld episode “The Limo”)) surreptitiously gives him the middle finger. I understand the need for comic relief in a serious novel like this, but the judge just seemed unnecessarily wacky.

One of the things that I have noticed in the nine months I have been Above the Law’s resident legal art/fiction critic is the dearth of quality modern legal thriller novels (a genre that seems to have peaked in the 1990s). For those readers out there who have read The Firm so many times that their copies are dog-eared, The Bomb Maker’s Son will make for a fine new read. And please send the author suggestions on better names for the Holzner-O’Brien Gang.

Ed. note: All links to books in this post are affiliate links.

The Bomb Maker’s Son [Amazon (affiliate link)]

Earlier: An Entertainment Lawyer And A Novelist: An Interview With Robert Rotstein

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