Randall Hicks - The Baby Game (2005)
Reviewed by Yvette Banek
An energetic and remarkably adept thriller debut written by a California attorney specializing in adoption law is not something you read every day and Randall Hicks’ creation, L.A. lawyer Toby Dillon, is not your run-of-the-mill hero. No sir. For in some strange confluence of family law and sports, Dillon is both an adoption lawyer and a tennis jockey. In exchange for free rent, he spends mornings scrubbing down the courts for the pro’s afternoon lessons while occasionally making up the odd doubles game. Tennis court and family court: all in a day’s work for Toby.
Pretty much hapless when not focusing on the law or hitting a few balls across the net, Toby shuns the shark-ish machinations of his highly successful father and two brothers; all three are attorneys who excel in the lucrative art of billable hours. A conundrum to his upwardly mobile family, he is very much a guy who marches to his own drummer.
"Where most attorneys are hired to destroy, I’m hired to build. Families. I like my job. I like the people I work with, both the birth mothers and the adoptive parents. If the babies could talk instead of just slobber, I’m sure I’d like them too."
Self deprecating, smart, easy-going, brimming with integrity, not only does Toby resist the lure of a high paying job, he lives and works in a small dinky apartment above said tennis courts to prove it. He also drives a '67 Ford Falcon with a wooden Indian unalterably lodged in the front passenger seat. In L.A., this gets noticed less than one would think.
Toby is currently handling the adoption of a baby daughter for his married childhood friends, movie stars Brogan Barlowe and Rita MacGilroy. Unwed mother Sammy Burroughs seems willing and able to hand over her newborn baby without much fuss and bother, but papers must be signed and legalities looked after and Toby is eager to oblige. But what starts out as a routine adoption, (well, as routine as it gets when the adoptive parents are dazzlingly rich and famous) soon takes a devious turn. Deadly secrets will cloud the three friends’ perceptions, test the boundaries of love, memory and friendship, and ultimately force Toby to make some very tough choices. That he does so in the end by being completely true to his essential nature makes for a very satisfying read.
Randall Hicks, in a fiction debut tour-de-force, has constructed a fast and furious whirlwind plot filled with laughs, heartbreak, unexpected twists, sudden turns, kidnapping, murder and a hell of a surprise ending. To say any more would be to give away too much, but once I started reading, I could not put the book down.
Except for a rookie’s sometime tendency to over-explain and perhaps, over-plot here and there, (previously, Hicks has been a non-fiction writer) all generally goes smoothly in this terrific, self-assured thriller by a writer who has created an all important niche for himself and his characters. I simply cannot wait to read the next in the Toby Dillon series.
Posted by Yvette Banek in Book Reviews | Permalink
