Due Process
This month we have five Sundays so I am starting my month with a fiction book, specifically book 2 of the Kingmaker series, Due Process, by Ari H. Mendelson.
When I reviewed Consent back in October, I said I thought it was a two-book series, the author kindly advised me it is a three-book series, so there is one more, which I’ll review in June. Also, I am very glad there’s a third book because this book ended with the bad guys metaphorically and literally beating the shit out of the good guys, and it would be awful to end a series on such a down note.
So, Due Process picks up right where Consent left off. At the end of that book, one of the hero’s had been arrested, although we don’t know for what charge. Well, the charge is revealed in this one and it’s...it’s pretty creative. And horrifying for its believability. I actually found this book to be quite educational just through reading the conversations between characters, and the one between reporter Johnathan Hall and his attorney explained a lot of what has gone wrong with the criminal justice system in the last 100 years.
It reminded me of just how thoroughly astray we’ve gone from James Madison, who said “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood: if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated or undergo such incessant changes, that no man who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.”
The judge didn’t even know what law the prosecutor was referencing. And Hall’s attorney covers the flaw in having elected judges vs appointed judges. Don’t get me wrong, there’s problems with appointed judges too, but elected judges are pretty damn fickle, especially if they’re facing re-election. Also, remember back in January when I reviewed Making a Case for Innocence? And I said get an attorney? It does no good to hire an attorney, if you’re not going to listen to their advice.
On the other hand, the conversation between the prosecutor, defense attorney, and Hall, make it very apparent why innocent people will accept a plea bargain. Prosecutors really will use any leverage they can to get that W in their column of cases.
Most of the events in this book occur between two years and two months before the next scheduled election, although Mendelson wisely did not list actual years in the book, just X years before election. The only exception to this was when he introduced a new character, Jonas Perez, and he backs the clock up 7 years to explain how Perez was an ideal candidate and recruit for Antira, Mendelson’s fictional counterpart to Antifa. The recruitment is a pretty accurate playbook as revealed by the real-life reporting of Andy Ngo and James O’Keefe. But more importantly, as heart breaking as it is to watch forlorn youth get sucked into this morass of evil, Mendelson’s story includes a pretty important redemption arc for Perez, which had me on the edge of my seat more than once.
And the beautiful starlet Meghan Peters starts to see the trap around her and the gilded cage she was lured into residing in. And when the pieces fall into place it’s darker than expected. But there’s still hope. Even the tech giants today have enemies, and in Mendelson’s book, it’s an anonymous hacker called DownyDuckling148. We know nothing about Ducky other than he lives in Iceland? I think it was Iceland. And he hates Neville. And when Peters figures out just how much she’s been manipulated, she makes contact with Hall’s team, who in turn gets her in contact with Ducky.
At the end of my review on Consent I expressed dread about what was planned for Hall’s friend Kevin, and I was half right on what I thought was going to happen. The half I missed hurt when I read it.
And what Neville is getting up to with his social engineering and manipulation is beyond horrifying. I most definitely did not see just how dark that was going to get. That also hurt. Like, even as the story unfolds, I didn’t know just how bad it was going to get.
This whole book left me with high levels of anxiety and now I HAVE to read book three to make sure the good guys DO win. Don’t get me wrong, the anxiety was of the page turning, oh my god what’s going to happen next, sort of anxiety, it was that good. It wasn’t until the last 100 pages that the good guys started getting a little ahead, but it ended on a down note, where the bad guys had a definite upper hand. And I am eagerly awaiting June when I will have time to finish the series.
