Book Review

By Derryll White

Burke, Alafair (2014). All Day and A Night.

I didn’t know what “all day and a night” meant until I read this book – serving a life sentence without possibility of parole in a federal penitentiary. Just ponder that for a moment; the rest of one’s life incarcerated and removed from the world – without any possibility of change. “Devastating,” I thought.

The story is wrapped in very complex police procedures, sometimes to the detriment of story flow. In the first 200 pages I learned far more about the relationship between District Attorneys and their assistants than I ever wanted to know.

Throughout the novel I felt procedural elements restricting story and character development. Alafair Burke does a very good job of keeping the story ending isolated, not telegraphing the outcome. By doing that she does keep the reader with her to the last page. I just wanted more – more depth of character, more richness of place. This is Ms. Burke’s tenth novel and she does many things well. Her sense of what it is to be a young woman on both sides of the legal world, judicial and policing, is exceptional. The novel is worth a read for that fact alone. But it will be a while before I try another of Alifair Burke’s offerings,

****

Excerpts from the novel:

SEX – Sex couldn’t make or break a marriage, but Helen had learned one thing about sex in 15 years of marriage counseling: it was a hell of a lot easier to put up with another person’s shit when you were having it on a regular basis.

POLICE – So many suspects think that cooperating with police will make them look innocent. In reality, talking to law enforcement is a one-way street. Lawyering up is a sure sign of guilt. But without real evidence of innocence, too much cooperation can look even worse.

DETECTIVE VS. U.S. DISTRICT ATTORNEY – “You know, Rogan was right.”

“Excuse me?”

“You say we react, like that’s a bad thing. But it’s just like he said: “This isn’t about a process for us. We see the bodies. We tell the survivors they’re never going to see their family members again. We look directly into the faces of killers, still high from the rush, and can smell the evil rotting them from the insides. You see… our paperwork.”

He was trying to calm her down but she couldn’t stop.

“You see the families after they’ve learned to live through their grief. You see the killers after their lawyers have cleaned them up and coached them for court. We react. now, because someone has to.”

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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