Stealing for a Living
By Naomi Rand
(Harper Collins, 2002 — 246 pages)
Reviewed by Ina R. Bort
From the New York Law Journal
October 24, 2003
In an on-line interview with "The Mystery Reader" in October, 2001, Naomi Rand explained that, in her early beginnings as an author, she wrote novels that were "character driven and without strong plots" and that were, as a result, never published.
It's not clear that Ms. Rand has made much progress since those early beginnings, if Stealing for a Living is any indication. What appears to have changed (for the worse) are the standards at publishing houses, or at Harper Collins, anyway.
To call the plot of Stealing for a Living "thin" is, to be clear, a gracious overstatement. Sure, there are the subtle outlines of three or four potentially interesting stories here, but none is ever developed. To the contrary, the story lines are forcibly hammered together in a clumsy, and wholly unbelievable, way. Ms. Rand simply did not know where to go with this book; nor did her editors require her to make that arduous, and seemingly rather important, decision. The result is a book that, after attempting to grapple with the Big Issues — race, abortion, the death penalty — ultimately goes nowhere at all.
At the book's center is Emma Price, an investigator in the Capital Defender's office in Brooklyn. It's the dead of winter and she's just been assigned to a dog of a case, the defense of Roland Everett. Everett is on death row after having been charged with the murder of three Hasidic Jews, his employers, whom he killed because they refused to pay his disability benefits after he was severely injured on the job. Emma, who is Jewish, takes an immediate dislike to her newest client who, besides being a gun-toting advocate of the workers' compensation laws, is an angry anti-Semite without a shred of remorse for what he's done. Her solution to the moral dilemma that arises when she is forced to represent him is a noble one: ignore Everett's case altogether!
Conveniently enough, Emma's boss, Dawn, has just left for China to fetch her new adopted baby girl, so Emma has the luxury of completely avoiding her vocational obligations, and Rand has the luxury of not having to bother writing what would have been a far more interesting story than the one she ultimately wrote. The fact that Emma's client is languishing in prison only seems to bother Emma once in a while. Besides, she's got plenty else to keep her busy: the absurd murder mystery that comprises the bulk of Stealing for a Living.
That would be the murder of Dr. Eleanor Hammond, a prominent abortionist who, at the opening of the book, is found dead in her own kitchen. She's been shot, execution style, and a leading suspect is Martin Diehl, ringleader of a pro-life activist group, the Society for the Protection of the Unborn. Hammond has long been a vocal pro-choice activist as well as a practitioner, and her rivalry with Diehl has spanned decades. Another suspect is Hammond's own son, Josh, who, before the murder, hadn't been back to visit his mother for 20 years, having stormed out back then over a never-really-explained argument. Emma finds herself thrust into this situation for several, presumably inappropriate (from a legal — and perhaps literary — perspective) reasons: first, she and Josh are old childhood friends who, among other things, dealt drugs and slept together; and second, the detective assigned to the case is Emma's occasional lover, Laurence Solomon (who, in case you were wondering, which is unlikely, is not Jewish, but black).
Thus we watch, with eyes glazed over, as Emma, through no more than a few casual conversations with her old pal Josh and a visit or two to the crime scene, brilliantly solves the mystery (not to mention a related mystery, the murder of Dr. Hammond's receptionist, Bertie), and ensures that justice is done! Perhaps most amazing of all is that her unsolicited participation in the case doesn't bother Laurence a tad, even though he's been spinning his wheels for weeks by the time that Emma waltzes in with all the answers.
Admittedly, Emma, the one bright light in this novel, is a rather likeable character, perhaps because she is refreshingly real, unlike so many of her fellow heroines of trashy legal thrillers. She's a harried working woman, desperately fending off creditors while singlehandedly trying to care for her two children. Her car is always breaking down in the snow, and she has no heat in the house this winter, as her boiler just broke, and she can't afford to replace it. Her husband has recently left her for a far younger and more glamorous woman (and, presumably with the assistance of brilliant legal counsel, appears to have entirely avoided paying a dime of child support). Emma only learns about his picture-perfect nuptials to Wife #2 upon reading the wedding announcements in The New York Times.
Rand paints an admirable picture of Emma, who not once wallows in self-pity while trudging towards the end of her marriage and through the travails of motherhood, which include the fact that her teenage son, Liam, has a proclivity for petty crime, and that his baby sitter, Katherine, has a proclivity for afternoon cocktails. It's tempting to commend Rand for creating, in Emma Price, a solid portrayal of a working mother, and an inspiring model for female readers. On closer examination, though, it's not clear that Emma is really working at all.
As previously mentioned, she doesn't really pay much attention to her job, nor does she have to. Instead, she spends an hour here, an hour there, dallying on the Hammond murder case. Best of all, her major financial woes are swept away by (suspected murderer, but who cares; money is money) Josh Hammond who has, since his abrupt departure from the neighborhood 20 years back, become a multi-millionaire. By the way, Josh's willingness to bail Emma out is largely attributable to the prospect of rekindling past romance with her in exchange for his cash.
So it turns out that it is possible to be a working mother in New York City, assuming your boss is on the other side of the globe, and completely preoccupied with things other than work, and your social circle includes millionaires who will buy you lots of stuff if you hold out the promise of sleeping with them. An inspiring message indeed.
