Justice sleeps but you might not until you finish reading

It’s been a long time since I read a book with vocabulary like you find in While Justice Sleeps by Stacey Abrams. Words and phrases shimmer throughout the book,  a storm of verbal confetti including cacophony, eidetic, epithetic, saturnine, weft, “parsing out opprobrium,” and others, the totality of which potent enough to ratchet up one’s verbal SAT scores. If you’re fond of rich vocabulary, Abram’s lexicon lifts you up on silvery wings and carries you swiftly through the pages.

The book is a winning trifecta of smart political thriller, investigation of global criminal weaponization of chromosomal research, and judicial intrigue at the highest levels, a tale of “carpetbaggers, and Frankensteins, and lesser kings,” with a cinematic quality. 

Supreme Court Justice Howard Wynn, gruff, inscrutable, imperial, curmudgeonly, and cantankerous, hates US President Brandon Stokes. His increasing paranoia about an upcoming SCOTUS vote on a Big Pharma merger (involving suspected monetization of cutting edge patented genetic research targeting certain ethnic religious groups) has Justice Wynn masterminding a strategy requiring the assistance of others to complete, as he communicates to kindred spirits in foreign lands on gamer private chat platforms in a desperate bid to set up circumstances that could ultimately ensure the discovery of a medical solution to a lethal condition he shares with his estranged son Jaden.

Avery Keene is Justice Howard Wynn’s young Black law clerk gifted with eidetic memory, diplomacy, and level headedness under fire, who later learns Wynn inexplicably designated her his legal guardian with power of attorney in lieu of immediate family members. The stakes are high, putting her in numerous life threatening situations, to forming alliances with others such as Wynn’s son Jaden, to seeking the truth behind the pharmaceutical merger, and ultimately as advocate before the Supreme Court bench and a gallery teeming with the nation’s power elite, some of whom wish her dead.

The narrative is peppered with such gems as “The freakish giant loomed like misbegotten Gulliver at 6’6,” hulking over his own respectable 5’11.” The President preferred the altitudinal equivalence of a meeting in the Oval Office, to the vertical pugilism on the standing cocktail circuit, but he hadn’t clawed his way to power by bending to redwoods coming toe to toe.” Another example is “Never heard of anything like this in 10 years as a DA...complaint zipped through the District Court and the Appeals Court like it had grease or an STD.” 

Abrams weaves a fascinating tale, deftly manipulating varied plot threads in a way that keeps the reader engaged. I wouldn’t mind seeing this as the first in a future series, and the book I’d most like to read is a fictionalized unvarnished account of what really happened in Georgia during the 2018 elections. I think it could be a blockbuster.