To Honor and Obey

One fall dawn in 1988, wealthy Upper East Side Manhattanite Louann Fratt, mother of three, went to the apartment of her estranged husband, Charles, to whom she had been married for 30 years, and fatally stabbed him. After reporting her crime to the police, she retained as counsel scruffy-looking Michael Dowd, a downtown lawyer in every sense, famed for his pro bono defenses of battered women. The curious thing about this re-creation of a case of no particular true-crime excitement is that we learn more about Dowd than about the Fratts. Taylor ( Trail of the Fox ) only superficially probes the wife's life as depersonalized handmaiden to a demanding husband who discarded her in middle age for another woman. At trial, pleading self-defense against her husband's attempted rape, Louann Fratt was found not guilty. So intense is the book's concentration on Dowd, however, that we're told not only his every utterance but virtually his every thought about this case and his others as well. The book proves to be less a defense of the suspect than of her attorney, who, we learn in an epilogue, in 1990 was suspended from practice for five years for paying bribes to a politician, an injustice, argues Taylor, since Dowd was the whistle-blower. Photos. (Mar.)