This is a complex drama of lawyerly intrigues and backroom political dealings, with a dash of evil multinational corporate plotting and a handful of roguish law enforcement officers of varying ranks. On that score, Abrams has realized what surely was her chief ambition - not to enlighten, but to entertain. But those desirous of perils and surprises will encounter them in abundance. Nor do Abrams’s corridors of power exude a sense of real-life verisimilitude - they, too, exist to serve her humming machine. Readers searching for dimensional characters whose inner lives inform a consistently credible narrative won’t find them in this book its climactic events, and the behaviors of the principals, require a particularly willful suspension of disbelief. Her narrative never pauses for breath - let alone contemplation. Not only does she succeed in keeping the pages turning, but the fusillade she triggers bespeaks a genuine gift for weaving a daunting number of plot threads into her labyrinthine but accelerating design. Concurrently, one is struck by Abrams’s considerable powers of invention. Too often, she and her supporting cast are whomever the story requires them to be. Some of her most striking characteristics are functional rather than organic. Avery lacks a fully developed persona, and frequently reacts to alarming events in ways that are emotionally and logically implausible. To say the least, While Justice Sleeps epitomizes the phrase 'plot driven'.
As the story progresses, Abrams’s current deficits as a novelist become apparent. In page after page of efficient and serviceable prose, Abrams creates an exceedingly convoluted but potentially intriguing landscape. At the outset, the customary conventions of legal thrillerdom require quickly immersing the reader in murky but momentous events - this is not, after all, Madame Bovary.
So the only fair question is not what she might have written, but whether she succeeds on the terms she set herself. impresses on several counts: that she is willing to risk the jaundiced eye of readers unsympathetic to her public career that she has the stuff to assay fiction in a new and challenging genre and that amid an exceedingly busy life she cares enough about the form to undertake the demanding business of turning an idea into a novel.
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