Illegal.

• Author: Pudlow, Jan
• Position: Book review

Illegal

By Paul Levine

Chapter One screeches open with a judge drawing a handgun from beneath his black robe and ordering a troubled trial lawyer to strip naked and spread his cheeks to see if he's wearing a wire.

Fast-paced Illegal, a thriller with a social conscience, just gets more riveting from there.

Right away, you learn that California lawyer Jimmy Payne, recruited by the cops to bribe a bad judge in a sting operation, wears red-and-white boxers with the Los Angeles Clippers logo because he favors underdogs.

That's because he can relate.

These days, after the death of his son and demise of his marriage, Payne is not on top of his game and could really use a good murder client "or a personal injury case with fractures to weight-bearing bones."

Instead, his clients are assorted drunks and check bouncers and hookers, and "Royal Payne" has too much time on his hands.

His bookshelves are lined with Scott Turow and George V. Higgins. "Crime stories well told. Payne didn't like those courtroom novels where the lawyers were heroes. Too unrealistic."

Yet, in Levine's well-told crime story, you immediately care about his flawed protagonist who escapes a jail sentence for contempt of court and winds up flung into the underbelly of illegal immigrants crossing from Mexico into California, trapped in human trafficking and sexual slavery.

Through it all, when Payne actually does become something of a hero, it rings true because the well-crafted characters in Illegal are robustly layered, nakedly human, and starkly real.

Levine is a Florida Bar member who lives in California and is an award-winning author of legal thrillers, who wrote for the CBS military drama "JAG." Levine's Web page--www.paul-levine. com--says he's worked as a newspaper reporter, law professor, and trial lawyer before becoming a full-time novelist. "Obviously, he cannot hold a job," he wryly says of himself.

While...