Michael A. McCoy/AP
In between organizing for voting rights and helping convince Georgia to vote blue in a presidential election for the first time since 1992, Stacey Abrams somehow found the time to write a thriller.
While Justice Sleeps, out now, is Abrams’s ninth novel and first straight thriller. (Her previous eight novels, all originally published under the pen name Selena Montgomery, were romantic suspense.) She’s also written two nonfiction books. To find out how she does it all, I called her up on the phone.
While Justice Sleeps is an unusually wonky thriller. It begins when Supreme Court Justice Howard Wynn, a cranky libertarian and the Court’s swing vote, falls into a coma right before the Court is set to consider a case involving a pharmaceutical merger. With Howard out of commission, the Court faces an existential crisis. The only way to vacate a Supreme Court justice’s seat is for them to die or retire. So what do you do if a justice isn’t dead or retired,
While Justice Sleeps by Stacey Abrams (Doubleday) While Justice Sleeps is a deftly written page-turner understated action, vivid characters and a tense, plausible plot.
The author, a former Georgia House of Representatives member and current political miracle worker Stacey Abrams has created a political thriller: Supreme Court justice Howard Wynn, suffering from a rare illness, falls into a coma, leaving his young law clerk, Avery Keene, as his legal guardian with power of attorney.
Keene soon finds herself the key figure in the planned merger of an American biotech company and an Indian genetics company. At stake, a weaponized genetic editing capability and the tenure of a corrupt American president. Wynn is the swing vote on the merger and his fate now is controlled by Keene.
By Stacey Abrams
One approaches a legal thriller rooted in high-stakes Washington politics with a certain trepidation â and a curiosity deepened, in this case, by Stacey Abramsâs chosen setting: the U.S. Supreme Court.
Questions proliferate. Will there be actual Republicans and Democrats? Will the politics feel authentic â as they did, for example, in Allen Druryâs Pulitzer Prize-winning epic from the 1950s, âAdvise and Consentâ?
Will the justices â as in life â be divided by ideology as well as by their disparate and often quirky personas? Will the author truly try to represent the hermetic world of the court or, hardest of all, the secretive and often byzantine process through which it renders its decisions?
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Review: Stacey Abrams writes a legal-political thriller
JEFF ROWE, Associated Press
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This image released by Doubleday shows While Justice Sleeps, a novel by Stacey Abrams. (Doubleday via AP)AP
“While Justice Sleeps,” Stacey Abrams (Doubleday)
“While Justice Sleeps” is a deftly written page-turner understated action, vivid characters and a tense, plausible plot.
The author, a former Georgia House of Representatives member and current political miracle worker Stacey Abrams has created a political thriller: Supreme Court justice Howard Wynn, suffering from a rare illness, falls into a coma, leaving his young law clerk, Avery Keene, as his legal guardian with power of attorney.