‘Survivor’s Guilt’ by Robyn Gigl

Published by Verve,
7 December 2023.
ISBN: 978-0-85730-845-0  (PB)

Courtroom thrillers are usually about ensuring an innocent person doesn’t pay for someone else’s crime, and so it is in this one. But what if the someone else doesn’t deserve to pay either? What if the real guilty party is the man lying on the floor with a bullet in his head? And what if that man’s accomplices are conspiring to... but that’s enough spoilers. Not that they’re really spoilers at all – it all becomes plain at an early stage.

At the heart of Robyn Gigl’s first novel was a struggle between real justice and the kind meted out by people with power, and there’s a large element of that here in her second as well. The difference is that it’s another. more sinister form of power: the kind that comes from knowing someone else’s dark secrets. The victim Charles Parsons has plenty of his own, and the evidence he holds is enough to destroy several other lives. His murder is recorded by a covert device hidden in his computer, and that recording lies at the heart of hotshot lawyer Erin McCabe’s defence of her client.

Erin is transgender, but this time the issues around her status and people’s attitudes to it and to her are not central to the story. They do form an interesting background, one that’s largely unexplored in crime fiction until now. The challenges presented by her first romantic relationship since she transitioned offer a fresh and sensitive counterpoint to the abuse and coercion other characters have endured. Her easy friendship with her business partner Duane Swisher serves a similar purpose with regard to the prejudice she meets (though not everywhere) in her professional life.

But the meat of the story is in the court case, which becomes a rollercoaster of how evidence is interpreted, whether the bad guys’ ruses will succeed, if certain people can be persuaded to do the right thing, and how far the law is really on the side of justice. It’s all played out by a cast of characters who make you want to cheer or boo, and who are all utterly believable. 

Questions hang in the air almost until the final page: who is Erin’s mysterious ‘guardian angel’? Will her client agree to tell her story in court? Can Charles Parsons’s coercion continue from beyond the grave? How far are his accomplices prepared to go? And on a lighter note, will Erin find love and happiness at last? The answers are there; you just have to keep reading to find them. And you’ll want to.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Robyn Gigl is an attorney who has been honoured by the ACLU-NJ for her work with the transgender community. A frequent lecturer on diversity issues, she lives in New Jersey, where she continues to practice law by day, and work on her next Erin McCabe novel by night.

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.