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Reckless Justice
David Kessler
Hodder & Stoughton hardback, 
Published June 1999
ISBN 0340708379
Coronet paperback, 320 pages, £6.99
Published September 1999
ISBN 0340708387
Review by Gerald Houghton (1999)

Here’s a curio: a book so appallingly written, shoddily plotted and shockingly reactionary that it urges you to run a mile in the other direction. And yet at the same time, a book with all the internal momentum of a particularly grisly motorway pile-up: you know you shouldn’t look but you just can’t help yourself.

The UK. Danny Keller’s brother is dead. He died fleeing custody after conviction for his daughter’s rape and murder. But Danny knows Paul was innocent. And what’s more, Danny thinks someone must pay for that injustice. So, with a ‘fiendish chuckle’ (I kid you not) he sets about bumping off the jury, one by one.

And if that sounds like an Ealing comedy, then you can be sure David Kessler won’t see the funny side.

This reviewer has never before come across a book quite so wrapped-up in its own self-importance: Kessler has researched this – and then some. Page after interminable page is taken up with the brain-numbing minutiae of breaking into DNA databases, taping police phone lines and manufacturing vicious anti-personnel weapons. As a veritable ‘How To’ manual it’s positively scary. ‘The killer seems to be a man with a mission . . . and he’s very determined to carry it out.’

The problem is that, the longer it goes on – and the sillier it gets – the less funny it becomes. In amidst Kessler’s technical regurgitations it doesn’t take a genius to spot that Reckless Justice is not only ridiculous, inept and psychologically shallow, but morally moribund into the bargain. The feeble-minded condoning of vigilantism evidenced by the conclusion would be offensive if Kessler could string a half-decent sentence together. ‘It was like a bitter blow hitting him in the stomach,’ is especially good.

A shockingly bad book, then, but one laced with such guilty pleasures that one almost feels able to commend it to your attention.