Try Dying

What author Bell is showing us with his creation of central character Ty Buchanan is how far a respectable man with an enviable life will go when his blissful state is torn apart by a criminal act. Murder and beatings aren't out of the question once you accept that, if you enter the underworld, violence is a given.

Besides the promise Ty enjoys at his successful Los Angeles law firm where he's a candidate for partner, his personal life is even more precious to him because of his imminent plans to marry fiancee Jacquelyn Dwyer. And a good outcome of his case defending a doctor in a defamation suit for publically denouncing an expert on repressed-memory could be enough to win that exalted position at the firm. It'd make a splendid wedding gift.

But it's not going to happen. In one of the weirder accidents known to modern man, Ernesto Bonilla, a strung out wife-killer, driving away from her dead body, stops on an elevated freeway ramp where he proceeds to shoot himself. His body falls over the rail and lands on a car. The driver of that car is Jacqueline Dwyer, found dead at the scene.

But, "found dead" doesn't mean from assumed causes. When Ty catches the first hint of this distinction - from a thug in dirty clothes who's been following him - he's numbed. After a couple of twenties change hands, the ratty looking guy spills that he was an eyewitness and that the lady at the wheel didn't die from the impact of the falling man but had been killed afterward. Ty's entire world takes a spin, with his social values and ambitions going into an unfamiliar orbit. All that matters now is finding the guy who took Jacqueline from him.

With various allies backing him up, Ty enters the world of the unsocial, the psychotic, the politically corrupt. Such powerful enemies will frame him for a killing later on when his investigations bring him closer to the truth than his adversaries find comfortable. His new status on the other side of the line - that of the criminally accused - his list of allies becoming undependable, Ty is compelled toward behavior he never learned in law school.

Estimable clarity and strong characters distinguish lawyer-author Bell's narrative, causing his readers to keep their eye and sympathies on his central character with laser focus and concern. He's crafted a defined development arc for his upstanding citizen whose training in legal issues inform the steps he's willing to take when personal tragedy pushes him into a swamp of criminality he must steer through, or die.

Though courtroom drama figures into the equation, Bell doesn't make legal proceedings dominant over the emotional and investigative elements. His man may be an attorney whose regard for the law is unquestioned and as lofty as a religion, but the dramatic essence of the tale is crafted out of a man's experience of personal tragedy bringing about a different awareness of himself. We can only admire an individual who has the capacity to see a different light when he subjects himself, with rare courage, to an unknown and untrained-for darkness.

Try Dying is engaging stuff and places Bell in a league alongside major novelists who rose to the craft from a legal background. Grisham and Sheehan come to mind.