(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

Ever since the rise of John Grisham, it seems sometimes that nearly every single person ever associated with the legal profession has decided that they too have a legal thriller inside them, just waiting to be written down and turned into a Tom Cruise movie; and now we have our latest, retired small-town judge Sandy Prindle's The Sins of Tarrant County. And like many of these thrillers from semi-amateur writers who used to be part of the legal system (and believe me, I've read more of these now than I care to admit), Prindle's book suffers from a series of basic problems that haunt most such books -- entire chapters that read like court transcripts, characters imbued with lazy stereotypes, clunky dialogue containing too few contractions to resemble regular human speech. ("What are you talking about, Jason?" "It is these example sentences that I am talking about!") It's not terrible as far as these types of books go, which is why it's not getting a terrible score; but Lord, it ain't good, and I snarkily confess that I recoiled a little in horror when reading at the end that this is merely volume one of a coming tetralogy (!) of similarly-themed actioners. Prindle still has some very basic lessons to learn about constructing a novel before his books have even a chance of becoming mainstream hits, and here's hoping that he chooses to get some of that training, to match his admittedly admirable ambitions.

Out of 10: 6.9 ( )