The Jezebel Remedy

Description

 A BOSTON GLOBE BEST MYSTERY OF THE YEAR

Lisa and Joe Stone, married for twenty years and partners in their small Virginia law firm, handle routine, run-of-the-mill cases, including never-ending complaints from their cantankerous client Lettie VanSandt.  When Lettie dies in a suspicious accident and unexpectedly leaves her entire estate to Joe, the Stones find themselves entangled in a corporate conspiracy that will require all their legal skills—not to mention some difficult ethical choices—for them to survive. Complicating matters, Lisa is desperately trying to shield Joe from a dreadful secret, a mistake that she would give anything to erase.

With a cast of perfectly drawn imperfect characters, an intricate tour of the legal system, and a remarkably entertaining plot alongside a no-holds-barred portrait of a marriage, The Jezebel Remedy  is a legal drama in a class of its own.

“Completely original and vastly entertaining . . . I nominate The Jezebel Remedy for best-plotted and quirkiest legal thriller of the year.”—Nelson DeMille

“[A] real pleasure . . . blends legal thriller with the more whimsical elements of a freewheeling, picaresque novel.”  
    —The Boston Globe

“Original, smart, breezily amusing . . . and damned good.”
    —The Miami Herald

“Clark is, hands down, our finest legal-thriller writer.”
    —Entertainment Weekly

“Witty, beautiful, intriguing, [and] genuine. . . .  Martin Clark entertains with every page.” 
    —The Roanoke Times
 
“A portrait of fine but flawed humans who find themselves unexpectedly thrust into the deep end of a system where the law can be either a life raft or a dead weight, depending on who gets to make the final judgment call. . . . Clark has a practiced ear for the subtlety and nuance of everyday existence.” 
    —BookPage
 
“Thoroughly addictive. Part thriller, part legal procedural, it is also positively disarming as it posits that doing the right thing is really the only choice, no matter how much trouble doing the right thing sometimes is.”
    —The Anniston Star
 
“The Jezebel Remedy is a cure for summer doldrums.” 
    —The Charlotte Observer  
 
“Fast-paced and delightfully unpredictable. . . Not only do the frequent plot twists keep the reader glued to the page, but Clark’s depiction of life in rural Virginia and the depth and sensitivity of his character portrayals make the book memorable for much more than its clever legal machinations.”
    —Library Journal (starred review)
 
“Its snappy repartee, shrewd regional observations, and quirky characterizations help one understand why Clark’s been compared to the likes of Elmore Leonard and, especially, Carl Hiaasen. Indeed, Clark seems to be doing for contemporary Virginia. . . what Hiaasen has done for South Florida.”
    —Kirkus Reviews
 
“A rollicking, comic legal thriller that encompasses false disguises, secret assignations, and a colorful cast of scene-stealing secondary characters.”  
    —Booklist

“[Clark] has a diabolical imagination, which he employs brilliantly. To his unconventional thrillers, he brings a keen understanding of high principles as well as the realistic nuts and bolts of the legal profession. The Jezebel Remedy is an intelligent and surprising legal thriller with a rich and realistic setting, blended seamlessly with the insightful story of a marriage.”
     —The News & Record (Greensboro, NC)

“A great David-and-Goliath story about a husband/wife law firm in rural Virginia. Legal thrills with all the quirks and comfort of small-town lawyering.”
     —Jamie Kornegay, Garden & Gun

Martin Clark is a Virginia circuit court judge. His previous novels have been chosen as a New York Times Notable Book, a Washington Post Book World Best Book of the Year, a Bookmarks Magazine Best Book of the Year, a finalist for the Stephen Crane First Fiction Award, and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. His novel The Legal Limit was the winner of the Library of Virginia’s People’s Choice Award and was called “a model of how to write a literary legal thriller” by The Oregonian. He lives in Patrick County, Virginia, with his wife, Deana.

www.martinclark.com  

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of The Jezebel Remedy.

1. Joe and Lisa are both respected lawyers in Henry County, yet they each have their own style of practicing law. How would you describe Lisa’s style as compared with Joe’s?

2. Several times throughout the novel, the Stones are stopped by local townspeople who thank them for their services and advocacy in the court system. How would you describe the Stones’ law practice? Their practice’s philosophy?

3. How would you describe the Stones’ partnership—both in the legal sense and in their marital life? Are they able to preserve the boundary between their working life and their home life? How is this complicated by the Lettie VanSandt case?

4. Trace the roots of Lisa’s marital dissatisfaction. What caused her to cheat on Joe? At what moment in the novel is her guilt most apparent? Did you think she was going to get caught or confess to her behavior?

5. From her very first scene in The Jezebel Remedy, Lettie VanSandt is characterized as an eccentric and obscene woman with a habit of indiscriminately slapping lawsuits on businesses. Given Lettie’s less-than-esteemed position in society, why do you think that Joe trusted that she had created something that was valuable to Benecorp?

6. Discuss the role of deception in The Jezebel Remedy. How is deception central to the plot? How do Lisa and Joe use deception to their advantage in the case against Benecorp? When does their deception backfire?

7. Despite the dark atmosphere surrounding the case, there are moments of humor throughout The Jezebel Remedy that add levity. What scene did you find most entertaining?

8. Joe Stone is consistently described by his peers as one of the most ethical practicing lawyers, even as his license is about to be suspended. At what moments—if any—does Joe’s behavior border on unethical during the proceedings with Benecorp? Does Lisa engage in any unethical behavior?

9. Discuss the relationship between M.J. and Lisa. How does M.J. act as a sounding board for Lisa? How does M.J. rely on her for her legal advice?

10. The scene in which Joe and Lisa visit Garrison aboard his yacht becomes powerful fodder later in the book. Discuss this scene. How would you describe Joe’s approach to the conversation? What assumptions did Garrison make about the Stones?

11. Lisa’s relationship with Brett Brooks is passionate but short-lived. Why do you think she was attracted to him? Discuss their trip to Nassau. What are her expectations for the getaway?

12. Throughout The Jezebel Remedy, an undercurrent of economic instability in Henry County is described. How do economics influence plot development? How do concerns about finances come into play for the Stones?

13. Dr. Downs is a crucial witness to Benecorp’s unethical and bullying behavior, however, given his medical history, he is constantly fighting against the stigma of his illnesses. Discuss his reliability. Do you think the Stones trust him entirely? What is the turning point for the Stones in believing Downs’s testimony?

14. Discuss Lisa’s decision to dress as Lettie during the DNA testing. Why do you think she ended up going forward with this risky plan?

15. The Jezebel Remedy has several twists and turns in the plot to keep you turning the pages. What was the most surprising aspect of the novel for you?

16. The title of the book is referenced as Lisa is going through the emotional roller coaster of her affair. How does she attempt to create a “remedy” for her actions? By the novel’s end, has she absolved herself of her guilt and shame?

Chapter One

But . . .

Her husband, Joe Stone, was in his office at the opposite end of the building, a pair of matching Persian rugs and a long hallway of beaten oak boards distant, his door shut, their sweet cur dog, Brownie, probably dozing tail to snout on a chamois pad beside the heat vent, and Joe was no doubt explaining every boilerplate detail of the umpteenth will he’d prepared for his mercurial, crackpot client Lettie Pauline VanSandt, who, only a few minutes ago, had tracked red mud across the nice carpets and into his office, heedless as always. Nothing but a damn millstone, Lettie. For sure, neither she nor Joe would tend to the mud.

Lisa Agnes Kennedy Hotchkiss Stone and Joe had been married almost twenty years. She had five names, whereas he had only two, lacked anything in the middle. “NMN” was how it appeared on his driver’s license. Joe NMN Stone. She and Joe had been law partners for practically all those years, just the two of them and their various secretaries, as well as an office manager they’d been able to afford once the money became consistent. This very November morning, watching him pour a cup of black coffee in their kitchen, she’d appreciated—­again—­what a graceful and handsome man he was: tall—­right at six-­three—­but not gangly or a beanpole, thick hair that held its dark color and several waves at age forty-­four, and a face full of fierce calm that was laid in deep and precise, difficult to budge. She loved him, absolutely she did, she loved her husband.

A Virginia Code volume was open on her desk, but she’d gotten sidetracked and wasn’t reading it. A single page had cowlicked away from the rest, floating betwixt and between. Lately she’d felt a bit stuck, preoccupied with the flat patches in her life, mulling and noodling, flummoxed by how she seemed to have wandered across an insidious boundary and been shanghaied into a dull land of earth tones, Scrabble games, paint-­by-­number vacations, Cinemax replays of A Star Is Born, monthly potlucks, Lean Cuisines, cobwebs, dust bunnies, marital conversations retarded by a mumbled “Huh?” or a distracted “What, sweetie?,” community center Zumba classes, flannel, mismatched silverware, lukewarm champagne and box steps every December 31, matted fleece bedroom slippers and sex so mission control she could count down the seconds between her husband biting her neck and squeezing her breast. She worried that her entire world, from alpha to omega, was nothing more than a stupefying loop, a big, whopping white-­bread bonanza, comfort and familiarity their own worst enemies.

A sizable part of her delicate mood was rooted in the past summer, June and July, and its cause was obvious and easy to understand—­she’d lost both her parents with no real warning, just unfair as hell. Her momma was killed by a monstrous clot and never woke up from a noon nap, the laundry still wooden-­pinned to an outside line, a pound of shrimp thawing in the sink, a candy dish filled with pink, yellow and green butter mints on the dining room table, ready for Wednesday bridge club. Her darling dad was gone a month later, walloped by a massive stroke, so tough he’d held on for almost a week before he died, barely seventy, paralyzed and grimacing in a hospital bed and unable to speak, and it was impossible to sit through two sweltering Baptist funerals and not wonder when her day was coming, whether she was wasting her own precious time.

Also, and she tried not to be hateful about it, but bless his heart, some of Joe’s quirks and habits had become a pain for her, and this wasn’t helping her disposition, either. The charming cowboy boots she’d cottoned to back in law school now struck her as Henry County hayseed if he wore them off the farm. Naming their shaggy black puppy with the single white spot on his flank Brownie was genius, but then came Katrina and New Orleans and Joe hit his own endless jackpot, and every time . .  . every freaking time . . . the mutt would roll over or shake hands or fetch his tennis ball, as predictable as a cuckoo clock at half-­hour intervals, Joe would crucify her last nerve with the “heckuva job, Brownie” line, and yesterday, in 2010, he’d repeated it again, praising the dog for scratching at the kitchen door, the same slobbering ruckus every Tuesday, the pooch eager for the front yard, where he could bark and greet the garbage truck.

Joe would absolutely ignite and go Full Lewis—­her term, after Jerry Lewis’s spastic Nutty Professor—­whenever he heard the opening riff of “Black Coffee in Bed” or Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “Bad Luck.” No matter how many times he’d listened to the intro, no matter how dated and old-­hat the songs.

At work, there was the trite shave-­and-­a-­haircut knock despite her begging him not to do it ever again, please.

He would make her sit in his office and he’d “call the shareholders’ meeting to order” and they’d vote on replacing the gutters or buying a new computer, even though it was only them, Joe and Lisa, husband and wife—­they were the entire law firm.

She was weary of his corny “great googly moogly” and, at the other end of the spectrum, his crass, indiscriminate use of the word fuck.

Worst was his riding a motor scooter—­not a motorcycle, mind you—­to town in warm weather, this huge man putt-­putting down Starling Avenue, an embarrassing big-­ass helmet strapped underneath his chin so that he favored the Great Gazoo, the crazy cartoon alien from The Flintstones, and, yeah, of course he knew the whole deal was goofy, but she was unable to convince him that even a maximum dose of self-­awareness and a tongue-­in-­cheek penumbra can’t save some choices from coming off as idiotic.

To be fair about it, she realized that some of her failings had to bother him, especially how she often forgot to completely close the dresser drawers and occasionally spilled nail polish on the bathroom tile and never returned the living room phone to its base, and there were probably heaps of other irritations that he was too decent to mention. He kept things in check much better than she did.

She loved him though, she did, loved him in the fashion, she supposed, that you love a spouse hamstrung by two decades of marriage, loved him with most of the shiny paint scrubbed off, the gloss long ago weathered away, her affection down to the solid girders and nuts and bolts and sturdy welds, the steel guts of the arrangement.

But . . .

She stared at the taupe grass cloth they’d selected from a ritzy 1990 sample book as they finished refurbishing what had formerly been a hometown department store in the era of Perma-­Prest and fancy petticoat displays. They’d not changed the walls since, and now the fragile threads and stiff, strawy weave were frayed and broken in places, especially at the corners and above the baseboards, and a few loose lengths of grass cocked out from their bindings like crippled insect legs. A vertical seam had separated, and Joe had tried to repair it with a specialty glue he’d discovered at Walmart, but the fix wasn’t what it should’ve been, so there was a bulge not far from the ceiling, an obvious sag that needed attention.

Joe’s voice came over her phone, very formally asking if she could walk down the hall and witness Lettie’s will, his words sounding tinny and off-­pitch through the speaker. “Sure,” she said. She noticed the numbers on the phone’s square metal buttons were getting harder and harder to see, eroded by thousands of pecks and taps, almost to the quick. “No problem.”

She knocked and entered his office without pausing, and Brownie raised his head and thumped-­thumped-­thumped-­thumped his tail, an arrhythmic beat that caught both cloth and the hardwood past the edge of his pad. The dog’s welcome didn’t last long, soon ended with a collapse and a sigh, a lazy tongue sloshing over his teeth and slight lips. The lips were black, matched his fur.

Lisa traced the muddy shoeprints to a chair where Joe’s most persistent visitor sat. Fortyish and spectacularly tattooed, “Petty Lettie” VanSandt hadn’t quit at simply inking her pale skin and matchstick limbs; she’d also gussied herself up with three nose rings and a gigantic gold front tooth just in case the needle painting needed accessorizing or wasn’t overwrought and sideshow enough. As a final baroque flourish, she’d recently added a tongue piercing, a tiny silver barbell she could rattlesnake out from behind the fake tooth. Lettie claimed she’d done the job herself, with an ice cube and free-­clinic hydrocodone tablets to numb the meat.

“My gracious,” she exclaimed. “It’s Della Street. The coffee made and plants watered and paper clips ordered?” There was a pet carrier beside her on the floor. A cat was inside.

“Don’t start with Lisa,” Joe warned her, his tone firm but mixed with a tiny undercurrent of amusement. “You know the rule.” He was behind a video camera, a Stone and Stone Attorneys at Law acquisition that made possible his latest service, a no-­frills recording of people as they read their wills aloud. The fifty extra dollars also purchased the chance to say your piece and have the last word; every syllable and cadence, whether praise or grievance, rebuke or forgiveness, was captured on a disc Joe placed in the client’s file along with a copy of the signed final papers. Testators often came dressed to the nines and most took the event quite seriously, fashioning their sentences carefully and soberly, as if they were mouthing church creeds or the Pledge of Allegiance. More important, the DVD also memorialized the maker’s competence and clear mind in case there were any challenges or questions later on, a genuine twofer, as Joe put it.

“Hello, Lettie,” Lisa said coolly. “Is that a cat you’ve brought with you to our office?”

Lettie’s three acres and ramshackle trailer were home to innumerable cats and dogs, strays and discards all, so many that anonymous do-­gooders periodically called Lee Orr, the animal control officer, and asked him to check on the poor things’ welfare, and he’d grumble and curse and drag out to her place, easing the county truck along her rutted dirt drive, and he always found every single creature well fed and kindly treated and granted free run of the premises, inside the double-­wide even, bedroom, den, kitchen counters, it didn’t seem to matter. But make no mistake, Lettie had her tolerances and kept her sanctuary reasonably clean, once using a broom to thwack a careless hound—­right in front of the officer—­when it commenced to squat and was too near the jackleg wooden deck.

“Yeah. So? You got a problem?” Oddly, Lettie grinned large and showed her gold tooth to full effect.

“Not really. What’s the cat’s name?” Lisa pasted on a phony smile. Maybe she could suffer through this.

“Why the hell would I name it, Della?” Lettie asked. “Huh? It’s a damn cat; it don’t speak English or understand nothing ’bout no name. Like every other animal, it just comes to my voice and knows the sound of a lid peelin’ off a can of food. I suppose you’d give a name to a parakeet? Goldfish? A skunk?”

“That’s twenty-­five more added to your bill, Lettie,” Joe intoned. He’d finished adjusting a tripod so the camera was aimed squarely at her.

“Yeah. And I been thinkin’ about that, your little ‘rule.’ If it’s twenty-­five bucks to be insultin’ to your secretary there, how much would it cost me to just slap the bejesus out of her?”

“Now you’re at fifty. Lisa isn’t my secretary. You know as much. I’ve told you a hundred times over. She’s a lawyer. Probably a better lawyer than I am. She was law review at the University of Virginia. Meaning, Lettie, she’s smart as a whip. Hey—­look at how much money she’s making for us right this instant. Fifty bucks in three minutes by merely walking down the hall.”

For some reason, before she spoke, Lettie tapped her garish tooth with her index finger. Several of her nails were painted green. She wore rings with colored stones. She popped the barbell into view. Withdrew it. “Probably the only pay Della will collect the whole week,” she remarked, giggling, her head bobbing atop an attenuated neck.

“Yeah,” Lisa said, “now maybe I can finally afford that rose tattoo I’ve always wanted. Or a snazzy nose ring.”

She and Lettie had gotten crosswise a couple years ago, when Lettie had inquired about obtaining a patent for “having trucks and bulldozers and whatnot beep when they go in reverse. A safety feature.” Impatiently informed that this technology was already in place and had been for a long while, she threw a hissy fit because Lisa refused to help her “sue the bastards who stole my idea.” Joe, though, always politely listened to her ramblings about perpetual motion machines, alchemy of every stripe and grade, poultices, miracle cures, inventions and contraptions. He’d set up a corporation for her and her nutty schemes, created pointless trusts and foundations, drafted a medical directive that she tinkered with almost monthly, prepared numerous limited liability companies and devoted hours to discussing her feuds with neighbors, magazine sweepstakes, the county landfill and the local board of supervisors, usually without charge, not so much as a penny, and his patience infuriated Lisa, this nitwit eccentric wasting Joe’s time, he mollycoddling her for no rational reason. At least he really would ding her for the extra fifty.

“Wait. So how is it she can say any nasty insult to me for free?” Lettie complained. “She’s makin’ fun of me.”

“I think you look great, Lettie,” Lisa offered. “Primed for a star turn on the midway. Or to hoist the Jolly Roger above your very own ship.”

“We’re ready,” Joe announced, almost before his wife finished.US

Additional information

Weight	10.96 oz
Dimensions	0.9000 × 5.2000 × 8.0000 in
Series	Vintage Contemporaries
Imprint	Vintage
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780804172905
ISBN-10	0804172900
Author	Martin Clark
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC034000, FIC044000
Subjects	thriller books, martin clark books, large print books for seniors best sellers paperback mystery, large print books for seniors, paperback books for inmates, books for inmates, large print books for seniors best sellers, women gifts, mysteries and thrillers, fiction books, mystery thriller suspense, satire, gifts for her, funny gifts, crime books, suspense books, Literature, literary fiction, funny books, gifts for women, women's fiction, thrillers, novels, FIC044000, humor, suspense, FIC034000, fiction, thriller, comedy, crime, women