cover image SCHEMES

SCHEMES

Peter A. Greenburg, SCHEMES Peter A. Greenburg

First-time novelist and practicing Beltway attorney Greenburg gives an excessively detailed and slow-moving account of just how lawyers can abuse their positions for personal gain. Jerry Wade, a disgruntled tax attorney, and his father, Sam, a fun-loving rogue with an accountant's knack for numbers and a shadowy government past, cook up an insurance scam. The plan is to get Wade's father, Sam, to pose as Robert Westerbrook and marry a wealthy, landowning widow who wants to get around inheritance taxes. While this is going on, Wade encounters an old college buddy named Billings (an ambulance chaser fallen on hard times) who manages to land a hot case involving a lawsuit for a crooked courier company. Quite late in this bulky book, the reader learns why Wade is so keen to live a life of crime—greed, of course. He wants to open his own firm. Greenburg is obviously not out to emulate Grisham. This novel is strictly for those who understand and appreciate the entwined intricacies of law and finance. The author has a fledgling ear for dialogue ("I'm a jerk of the mild-mannered, non-table thumping variety"). He also boasts an unassailable command of laws pertaining to real estate, tax preparation, estate planning, insurance and business incorporation, but he writes too much like a lawyer presenting case histories. No character stands out: rather, the novel's real protagonist is an amalgam of Wade and his cronies, cold, calculating Beltway barracudas all. At best, the book is a step-by-step illustration of how lawyers can break the law and get away with it, but readers will be in for a long slog. (Apr.)