Rating: 
Summary: Works on many levels
Review: Another terrific book by Baine. Couldn't put it down during the trial scenes. It contains more ambitious themes than Harmful Intent: Hume vs. Kant overlaid on the Bosnian atrocities. A subtle exploration of the Sin of Pride. A case of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder challenging the need of another to repair damaged people. Inhabiting the grief of the loss of a spouse and the loss of a mother. Nonchalant, driven exhumation experts. Colorado nature rendered in superb Gary Snyder diction.It may be artistic license, or it may be instructional, but the lawyer-narrator ignores several serious conflicts of interest. He would not be able to serve as conservator of the original victim, then later as conservator of the victim's wife (who was likely incapacitated by the victim), then, after the wife's death, represent her daughter in a wrongful death suit against the original vicitim. In the course of the story the narrator also commits breaking and entering, repeatedly seeks to have a physician breach his patient's confidentiality, rifles through the physician's files, and withholds conclusive evidence of homicide from the police and district attorney until it suits his litigation tactics to reveal it. So, even at the level of the narration Kerr has successfully exemplified the central question of the book -- how is that good people come to do evil acts?
Rating:
Summary: Real Heroes. REAL HEROINES!
Review: Baine Kerr is back, at last. I devour mysteries and courtroom dramas, which is how I strayed across Kerr's last novel, Harmful Intent...and his incredible circle of powerful, indomitable female characters. Even wounded, even dying, they defy fate. In less capable hands, they would just be female superheroes. Kerr goes the extra mile. He creates real heroines, Trojan women for our times. Ever since Harmful Intent, I've been holding my breath to see if he would deliver again. To my delight, Wrongful Death gives us a whole new set of women to believe in. I love Kerr's novels, and puzzle over them. In each, our main man is a man, the atrocities are muscular, the injustice is as humanly wicked as it gets. But somehow, in each, the heart and soul are deeply, genuinely feminine. His "wrongful death", the death of June, is almost Shakesperean in its power. Wrongful Death is outrageously good.
Rating:
Summary: Real Heroes. REAL HEROINES!
Review: Baine Kerr is back, at last. I devour mysteries and courtroom dramas, which is how I strayed across Kerr's last novel, Harmful Intent...and his incredible circle of powerful, indomitable female characters. Even wounded, even dying, they defy fate. In less capable hands, they would just be female superheroes. Kerr goes the extra mile. He creates real heroines, Trojan women for our times. Ever since Harmful Intent, I've been holding my breath to see if he would deliver again. To my delight, Wrongful Death gives us a whole new set of women to believe in. I love Kerr's novels, and puzzle over them. In each, our main man is a man, the atrocities are muscular, the injustice is as humanly wicked as it gets. But somehow, in each, the heart and soul are deeply, genuinely feminine. His "wrongful death", the death of June, is almost Shakesperean in its power. Wrongful Death is outrageously good.
Rating:
Summary: Fighting the nightmare!
Review: I'm constantly looking for novels that don't just give us an alternate reality, but actually give us our own reality stripped of the talking heads and politicos and corporate bull. Wrongful Death does that. Here's finally a book that brings Bosnia home, and shows how the evil that committed genocide in the killing fields could just as well reside here. I don't want to give away the ending, so will simply applaud Kerr's ability to create a killer who is not another serial remake of Hannibal Lecter, but a genuinely complicated and decent man who took a wrong turn. In exposing him, Wrongful Death exposes us all to the temptations of power and the tasks of finding justice.
Rating:
Summary: stunning
Review: Kerr's first novel was so good that I waited, quite impatiently, for this one. Some who read the first novel may be taken aback by the change in approach and pace. This novel is far more complex than the first; it will indeed take some settling in. But once you are hooked, and it doesn't take long, this intricately told story won't let you go. Many lawyers who write novels can tell a story, but can't write well. Kerr writes beautifully, and he tells a multilayered and ambitious story very well. While in his first novel the primary antagonist was (to my tastes) too little developed, in this novel that character is explored fully. And the four primary female roles are wonderful, each of them complex and interesting and compelling in a different way. The novel builds up, carefully, to a series of court scenes which are the most dramatic and tense of any I've read for a long while. I've thought about this novel constantly since I finished it. Bravo. I'm already waiting for the next one.
Rating: 
Summary: First Rate Legal Thriller
Review: Normally I don't read many books in this genre, although I enjoy the legal chess moves, both in and out of court. The last two I recall finishing were John Grisham's 'The Firm' and Scott Turow's 'Pleading Guilty'. Usually I just wait for the movie to come out. Kerr's specialty is, to be exact, the medical legal thriller. As a medical malpractice lawyer, as well as a former war crimes journalist in The Hague and a supervisor of the first democratic municiple elections in the Serb Republic of Bosnia(Former Yugoslavia), he brings considerable knowledge and experience to his writing. His style of writing sometimes gets entangled in legal and medical lingo. This is forgivable because of the completity of the subject at hand. I wonder with the current conflict in the Middle East, that the Geneva Convention, first convened in 1949, is more relevant then ever.
Rating:
Summary: First Rate Legal Thriller
Review: Normally I don't read many books in this genre, although I enjoy the legal chess moves, both in and out of court. The last two I recall finishing were John Grisham's 'The Firm' and Scott Turow's 'Pleading Guilty'. Usually I just wait for the movie to come out. Kerr's specialty is, to be exact, the medical legal thriller. As a medical malpractice lawyer, as well as a former war crimes journalist in The Hague and a supervisor of the first democratic municiple elections in the Serb Republic of Bosnia(Former Yugoslavia), he brings considerable knowledge and experience to his writing. His style of writing sometimes gets entangled in legal and medical lingo. This is forgivable because of the completity of the subject at hand. I wonder with the current conflict in the Middle East, that the Geneva Convention, first convened in 1949, is more relevant then ever.
Rating:
Summary: Finally, a lawyer gets it right
Review: This novel has an excellent plot with insights into several areas
of personal injury actions. The author manages to discuss
issues on three different levels simultaneously and every
reader finds a comfort level that leads to entertaining and
informative reading. Mr. Kerr mixes medical, legal, and
psychological elments nicely so that the reader is the big
winner. As a personal injury lawyer myself, I found that Mr.
Kerr painted a realistic picture of much of the strategy behind
a trial which constitutes a great opportunity for those who
have not participated in a trial as an attorney to develop
new appreciation for the process. This book is definitely worth
the investment of time to read.
Rating:
Summary: Justice out of the ruins.
Review: With his last novel, Harmful Intent, Baine Kerr proved himself a master storyteller. At the time, I remarked to an audience that Kerr is one of those writers every reader wants to read, and every writer envies. I have a double-connect with this latest offering, Wrongful Death, first as a writer, and second as a former election supervisor in Bosnia (like Kerr.) My verdict: Wrongful Death is a classic waiting to happen. Both the tale and the telling are sophisticated and explosive. Kerr gives us a heart of darkness that is - literally - a land mine, planted in the rib cage of a Bosnian massacre victim. Page after page, we wait for the atrocity within an atrocity to detonate. When it finally does - of all places, in peaceful Colorado - Kerr's handful of heroes finds its true hidden heart, not in vengeance, but in justice. Wrongful Death does more than set a new standard for legal thrillers, it seizes the genre to speak to our times and demand goodness from the ruins.
Rating:
Summary: Justice out of the ruins.
Review: With his last novel, Harmful Intent, Baine Kerr proved himself a master storyteller. At the time, I remarked to an audience that Kerr is one of those writers every reader wants to read, and every writer envies. I have a double-connect with this latest offering, Wrongful Death, first as a writer, and second as a former election supervisor in Bosnia (like Kerr.) My verdict: Wrongful Death is a classic waiting to happen. Both the tale and the telling are sophisticated and explosive. Kerr gives us a heart of darkness that is - literally - a land mine, planted in the rib cage of a Bosnian massacre victim. Page after page, we wait for the atrocity within an atrocity to detonate. When it finally does - of all places, in peaceful Colorado - Kerr's handful of heroes finds its true hidden heart, not in vengeance, but in justice. Wrongful Death does more than set a new standard for legal thrillers, it seizes the genre to speak to our times and demand goodness from the ruins.
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