The Night Lawyer: A Novel of Suspense

by Michelle Spring

Book Overview

A young female attorney is menaced by a mysterious stalker, in this gripping psychological thriller based on the firsthand experience of the award-winning author of In the Midnight Hour. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345437462
• ISBN13: 9780345437464
• Release Date: November 2006
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.0" x 1.3" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

A CHILLING RICH EVOCATION OF LONDON

Michelle Spring deserves her reputation as a topnotch writer of psychological suspense (In the Midnight Hour, Nights in White Satin.) She goes full throttle again to deliver chills and nail biting tension with The Night Lawyer. Ellie Porter is a young woman struggling to put her life back in order following a nervous breakdown. Abandonment by her married lover was the major cause of her illness, although she is also haunted by the murder of her father some twenty years ago. Slightly built she is blessed with long, curly reddish gold hair, and an eye catching figure. ""Though Ellie's scarcely aware of it, heads turn and grown men weaken when she shrugs off a shawl to reveal a well-cut black dress and a decolletage to die for." She's pays scant attention to her assets as she concentrates on regaining mental health. Her mother, Anabel, is of little help, rather the opposite constantly harping on Ellie's weight gain, nagging that she'll never attract another man. That's the last thing Ellie wants. She turns to karate to boost her self-confidence, and in order to practice during the day she takes a night job. This is not just any job, she's a night lawyer with London's Chronicle newspaper. She's the one responsible for catching anything that might be cause for legal action against the paper. Ellie's the Chronicle's only night lawyer, and she works alone. She seems well on the road to recovery when her tranquility at home is interrupted by sounds coming through the wall from next door. It is Jessica, a young neighbor with a bent for self-mutilation, and Jessica's boyfriend, Tull, who has an aversion to honest labor. Almost against her will we see soft-hearted Ellie becoming involved in the young woman's troubled life. That is but one drama that intrudes upon her world - Ellie believes she is being watched, stalked, and she is. Someone follows her in the dark of night when she leaves work. Who and why? British author Spring richly evokes London, the Isle of Dogs, the Docklands. Her setting is described not only with telling detail but with affection. For this reader Ellie's character was not presented as clearly, yet suspense is well crafted as it moves, albeit slowly, to a startling finish. - Gail Cooke

The Night Lawyer and the Edge of Be(longing) in East London

Review of The Night Lawyer, by Michelle Spring Random House, 2006 Rarely does a novel do so much to capture the visceral as well as the visual energy of both a place and state of being, than does Michelle Spring's new novel, The Night Lawyer. The book offers up an experience of East London and its towering financial centre at Canary Wharf, imposed against a night snapshot of a city in a moment in time: in stark contrast to the last few remaining rows of Victorian workers cottages, abandoned shipyards and dock warehouses of the Isle of Dogs. It describes the social and architectural discrepancies of rich and poor, stainless steel and old wood, imported marble and muddy footpaths, all bound together by the energy of the people who live in the Thames Gateway, and who travel in and out via the DLR (Docklands Light Railway), which connects this urban but remote eastern waterway area to the city of London, and the world beyond. The language of the novel is at once sparse and elegant- evoking the simplicity and stunning chiaroscuro of a skyline at night, where the unseen facets of cranes, towers, and plumes of smoke fuse above and put into perspective the toiling of people on the ground. Yet all this, rich as it is, is merely the backdrop for the story of a remarkable young woman: Eleanor Porter, the night lawyer hired to do the lonely late night shift at a tabloid newspaper- a dangerous job in more ways than one, but the right job to test the mettle of a woman newly returned to work and life after a serious breakdown. Like the Docklands of the novel's setting, the main character is herself a set of contradictions that flow into a solid whole. Eleanor, or Ellie, is petite, but strong. She twirls like a dancer but also kicks with the best in her karate club. She has learned how to live alone, how to keep her space simple and clean, without the clutter of domestic objects, but with easy to follow walls and boundaries. She lives alone but has an empathy for others that takes her, against her will and better judgment, out by foot through the winding streets and canals and between the wealth of her office tower and the mixed economy of her new neighborhood. She stands up to the hooded youths who hang around menacing along her street, and traverses the great divide of her own safe garden wall to help the young neighbor girl whose boyfriend contributes to both women's senses of uncertainty in a hard world. The Night Lawyer is the story of a woman who comes to terms with the process of being stalked, and who does so alone. The police do not help, the neighbors do not help, the office colleagues who try to help fail to understand the magnitude of the problem. Ellie helps herself. Her story is one of the transformative female experience of emerging from victimhood to survivor. Her is also the story of emancipation from the burden of deep memory of abuse, unearthed by the stirrings of a photograph, brought to her atten

strong psychological suspense thriller

Lawyer Ellie Porter honestly thought her married lover was going to dump his wife to be with her. However, his wife got pregnant and he broke it off with her causing her to have a nervous breakdown. She commits herself into a psychiatric hospital and when she comes out she has to start over in her career. The only job she can get is THE NIGHT LAWYER for a tabloid paper the Chronicle making sure the stories reporters write aren't libelous. Carl Hewitt who notices Ellie getting out of the lift starts watching her because she is like a breath of fresh air in the polluted political arena. Jonathan, a colleague from work, befriends her and an unknown co-worker Tristan Blacombe compliments her on her work. However, her personal life is in turmoil as she feels someone is stalking her. Ellie also has a threatening letter delivered to her and has a peeping tom watching her from behind some bushes on her lawn when she is semi-naked. Most frightening of all someone broke into her house and she was never aware of it. If she doesn't get some answers soon, she will have another nervous breakdown. Michelle Spring has written an extraordinary work of psychological suspense with a gothic foreboding atmosphere that sends a chill down the spines of the reader. The protagonist is trying to stay calm in the face of adversity but as she feels increasingly threatened, she is determined to find out who is doing this to her and why. THE NIGHT LAWYER will be appreciated by those readers who like the works of Joy Fielding and Jody Picoult. Harriet Klausner