Reviewed by: Nichi Hodgson
Author: Paul Genney
Publisher: Dedalus Books
ISBN: 1 903517 96 3
Price: £9.99

In Sentence Adjourned, Paul Genny’s barrister creation Henry Wallace is again up to his treacly legal best. Firstly, there's the matter of a stolen Lamborghini and a substantial terrorist action, then the defence of his overbearing chamber-mate Giles to concoct, following a punch-up at the wedding of Wallace's former squeeze, Pauline.

Immediately, Wallace (or rather, his indispensable Man Friday, Jas) sets to evidence-collecting. In Wallace-World, the silver-tongued rivals are coated in ‘a hint of brylcream, a touch of musk’, the blandly virtuous women 'pedestrian mannered', and the colourfully capered ones, ‘getting a bit fat round the thighs'.

From the minute Wallace attends to the case of the missing lamborghini and/or pursuit of its treacherous lady-owner, Clematis, Genney’s penchant for physiognomic deduction means we know it can only end badly – mainly because of the endless crossing and uncrossing of those duplicitous legs – and soon enough, Wallace is on a comedy scree-scramble to escape Clematis' cuckolded husband, prior to Trouble and Strife suing him for barristerial negligence.

Unfortunately, Wallace doesn’t fair much better with the rest of his caseload and by the time Giles is prime suspect in the murder of the doleful Doreen, yet another one of Wallace’s waylaid conquests, the legal star rising belongs to Jas, the orange-juice drinking Muslim making his Old Bailey debut with the poached terrorist case.

Dispensing with the legal detail as quickly as plausible, Genney ferrets on the plot by packing in cliff-hanger chapter endings. Some of the lines though, self-conscious or otherwise, are Christmas-cracker cringe-worthy, whether it's Wallace on the allure of women: ‘There's a saying in Guatemala: a hot woman has more pull than a team of oxen’; or on the perfidy of terrorists: ‘I've been to holiday to Morocco. I know what Islam is!’

But there's humour, wry and farcical in abundance, and a generous bout of self-deprecating Yorkshireman's nouse (‘A jury of murders. The sort of jury you sometimes get in Hull.’) which makes a change from the usual sentimental depiction of the whippet-and-rhubarb idyll.

If you like your legal chasers with a Jilly Cooperish touch of film noir, Genney's serial romp will be pinot grigio to your palate. Judging by the overblown ending, there's definitely another Wallacian scrape to come.

Nichi Hodgson is editorial assistant for the Law Society Sections

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