Plea of Insanity
by Julia Hoffman

Release Date: 31st Jan 2008
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 978 0 141 02459 2
RRP: Ł6.99

Courtroom drama with a social conscience.

A young female attorney is caught up in the politics of the legal system and a man’s ambition to become the next State Attorney. Julia is not your average lawyer though, she has a dark past and a hidden family secret that in some ways she has been hiding from herself – until she is pressured onto her first murder case by Rick Bellido – the man will hunger pains for power and that coveted State Attorney job.

The case is almost superfluous as the story unfolds and it becomes more about the unwanted memories returning as Julia is forced to confront her own past and the grisly details of the fateful night when her own brother slaughtered her parents whilst she was at a sleepover. In actual fact, the story converges and becomes a concerted effort to understand and sympathise with those who are diagnosed as schizophrenic, as indeed, her brother is.

Whilst we learn something of the disease, the author does nothing to contradict the typical media view that schizophrenia is an illness associated with extreme violence – something the medical profession has tried repeatedly to repeal. This is disappointing. With most schizophrenics preferring to be social recluses, unable to live in the real world as theirs is so distorted from reality that normal living becomes impossible.

There is a single short chapter that opens the door to a potential twist in the murder case – where an unknown assailant is sizing up a new victim and her family, whilst the incumbent in safely locked up... but it never really goes anywhere and despite the defendant smiling as he gets let off the death sentence as the jury finds him not guilty because of insanity, we’re not left any the wiser as to whether or not he is indeed crazy or not. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.

What starts out as a horrifying murder and subsequent courtroom battle, turns into a personal journey of discovery for Julia and her own decent into schizophrenia. And for that reason alone, it is dissatisfying as it fails to live up to the reader’s expectation for a full-bodied murder investigation with deft twists and turns. There are no twists, no turns and in the end you feel mildly annoyed that the author couldn’t have left his conscience and interest in schizophrenia aside just long enough to make a decent go out of the original plot.

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