The Printed Page

Title: Nibble & Kuhn
Author/website: David Schmahmann
288 pages
Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers
Publication date: November ’09
Genre: Fiction – legal
Would I recommend it: Undecided
Journal notes: If you like your legal stories high-octane than Nibble and Kuhn is not the book for you. I prefer my legal thrillers along the lines of a Jerry Burckhemier movie or TV series. Something that gets my pulse pounding and heart racing. Something to entice me to turn pages faster than I can read them. A story that puts me on the edge of my seat wondering just exactly how the lead character is going to get themselves out of their latest predicament. Those types of situations aren’t anywhere to be found in this story. Nibble and Kuhn is more like watching a smooth flowing summer river. The story meanders along through Derek’s personal and work life barely moving a hair out of place. This is one of those stories that was decent but doesn’t make an impression. By this time next week it will be a distant memory.

The novel is a satire of the law (the point of the story that I missed), and follows two newcomers—and paramours—at a proper corporate law firm in Boston as it comically tries to rebrand itself for the Google era; exposing the deep disaffection people feel about the practice of law and the seemingly irrational way in which the law is often applied.

An unraveling law firm. An unwinnable case. An unworkable love.

Derek Dover has it all.

Derek’s up for partner at Nibble & Kuhn just as that most proper of Boston law firms comically tries to `rebrand’ itself for the Google era. Pompous and arbitrary, the ruling junta of partners saddles him with a high visibility lawsuit just weeks before trial. The diligent young attorney arranges things so that Maria Parma, a new associate in the firm for whom he’s fallen hard, also gets named to the case. Maria, in turn, can’t keep her hands off Derek, but it’s complicated because she’s engaged to someone else.

As Derek prepares his case on behalf of seven young victims of an industrial polluter, his anxieties about his career and his torments over Maria’s mixed messages only increase. Have his eccentric WASP superiors handed him a `toxic’ case to ruin his chances of becoming a partner? How can he get his opponents to settle – an outcome the presiding judge all but demands – unless his unorthodox `expert witnesses’ perform with enough gravitas to match that of the other side with its Harvard Medical School scientist? Will Nibble & Kuhn survive the partners’ spectacularly bad business judgments? Does it even matter to Derek, given that his looming fiasco of a trial and his indiscretions with Maria seem set to sink any chance he ever had at partnership?

Ultimately, Derek sets into motion a line of inquiry that spins events entirely out of the control of the judge, jury, and any and all attorneys.

(Nibble & Kuhn pdf file was provided to me by Jacob of Academy Chicago Publishers. I was not paid and the pdf file has been removed from my Kindle. )