The heroine and narrator of the book, Mary Di Nunzio, is an associate in a corporate law firm in Philadelphia and up for promotion to partner. She's foul-mouthed, ballsy wise-cracking and the voice is pretty light and humorous. It's not just first person but present tense and sounds a bit odd. Present tense often lends a sense of lyricism and immediacy but that's not really the tone set here.
The thing is, even though this was on a Suspense novel reading list and is billed as a legal thriller, I felt that what this was meant to be--and should have been--was chick lit. It might have worked well as chick lit. There's a certain wit and a breeziness to the voice. Mary is close to a family full of quirky characters such as a twin who is a novice in a cloistered Catholic order. At the firm there's her best friend Judy, her loyal gay male secretary Brent and a fellow associate who is trying to woo her. Mary's still grieving though for her husband who was killed in a seeming accident, but she's just beginning to consider picking up on her personal life. Despite that from the beginning Mary is dealing with harassing hangup calls and a stalker, for the first hundred pages or so there really is no sense of menace.
So when that part of the book does kick into gear, I felt as if I accidentally had picked up another book. And I don't feel it ever comes together well as either a suspense novel or legal thriller. In fact, I thought the resolution was laugh-out-loud funny in a bad way. This didn't leave me wanting to ever read more of Lisa Scottoline.
