Opening Lines
The opening lines of the novel foreshadow the occurrences of metaphorical imagery to come. It will appear often, though not in ways seeking to reach the heights of poetic language. Simple and direct, like the facts used to pursue justice. Well, maybe not quite like that:
“The morning air off the Mojave in late winter is as clean and crisp as you’ll ever breathe in Los Angeles County. It carries the taste of promise on it.”
Testaments
A character uses metaphor to make one of those assertions that divides all of humanity into two separate and distinct camps. He doesn’t explicitly say so, but what he is describing here can also divide humanity into either Old Testament or New Testament types:
“They’re either eye-for-an-eye people or they are turn-the-cheek people.”
A Late Lesson
The narrating protagonist is a lawyer. Therefore, you would think he would have learned long beforehand that making any sort of response to a law enforcement deputy that is not absolutely positively an affirmation of their infallibility of judgment and righteous duty is a bad idea. However, he manages even this late in the game to go one step further and respond to a deputy by complaining. The simile describing the consequences rings very, very true:
“Like a restaurant customer who gets the cold soup he sent back to the kitchen returned hot with the piquant taste of saliva in it, I should have known better.”
And Almost as Overpaid
What is a lawyer? Ask a lawyer if you really want to know. Or, failing that opportunity, read what a character in a legal thriller who is a lawyer has to say about his part in the slow grinding cylinders of the pursuit of justice:
“The law was a large, rusting machine that sucked up people and lives and money. I was just a mechanic. I had become expert at going into the machine and fixing things and extracting what I needed from it in return.”
San Quentin
San Quentin is one of the most famous prisons in America. As well, perhaps, as being one of the most infamous. Although perhaps not as much now as during its heyday, just the name San Quentin was enough to inspire dread and terror:
“San Quentin is over a century old and looks as though the soul of every prisoner who lived or died there is etched on its dark walls.”
