A Fool's GoldA Fool's Gold
The author of Where the Rivers Ran Backward describes how, as a young lawyer fresh out of law school, he took a job with Thaddeus Silk, a charistmatic but shady attorney whose unexpected death leaves him caught in the middle between eccentric clients and law enforcement in offbeat cases that will take years to unravel. 40,000 first printing.
Recently out of law school, Bill Merritt takes a job working for a slightly shady but charismatic lawyer named Thaddeus Silk, who promises to be a good, if somewhat eccentric, mentor. But after just a few months, Thaddeus drops dead from a heart attack, and Bill, with precious little experience, is left to pick up the pieces of his chaotic and ill-managed practice. Before he can even start to make sense of the mess that was Thaddeus's legal life, the police are knocking at his door, and Bill is being accused of fencing stolen treasure.
A week or so after Thaddeus's death, Bill inherits his first real clients, Abby Birdsong and Grady Jackson, whose files are among the boxes and papers and bourbon bottles that litter his office. Abby is a middle-aged, overweight, hippie ex-logger who has been caught with some of the oldest, foulest marijuana imaginable. Grady, known around town as the Crazy Man of Neahkahnie Mountain, is a lawyer's dream, or so Bill thinks. For ten years, he has paid Thaddeus Silk & Associates to sue the state of Oregon for permission - which has never been granted - to dig holes in a state-owned beach. To Bill, it seems like an expensive way to go crazy, but Grady is single-minded in his pursuit. He believes chests of Spanish gold are buried on Neahkahnie Mountain, and he wants the state to let him dig them up.
As legal matters heat up and Bill hears there's a warrant for his arrest just waiting for a judge's signature, the cases of the skunky pot and the mythical Spanish treasure collide in ways that seem too fantastic to be true. It took nineteen years for Bill to finally puzzle out the details - how Thaddeus and Bill, Abby and Grady, assorted law enforcement officials and colorful local hangers-on all overlap and interconnect.
Proving yet again that life can always trump fiction in the contest for strangeness, Merritt, a former lawyer, recounts his experiences with a couple of clients embroiled in dope busts and lost Spanish gold on the Oregon coast. Merritt's capers involve four cases whose connections he did not discover for 19 years. Underlying the story is one of the longest and most tantalizing hunts for lost treasure in history. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
A fantastically eccentric true crime caper that does for coastal Oregon what Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil did for Savannah.
Just a few months out of law school, Bill Merritt takes a job working for a slightly shady but charismatic lawyer named Thaddeus Silk. Only months later, Thaddeus drops dead of a heart attack, and Bill is left to pick up the pieces of his chaotic and poorly managed practice. Before he can even start to make sense of the mess that was Thaddeus's legal life, the police are knocking at his door, and Bill is being accused of fencing stolen treasure. Enter Abby Birdsong and Grady Jackson, two clients of Thaddeus's whose files are among the boxes and papers and bourbon bottles that litter his office. Drug charges had been brought against Abby for carrying two pounds of pot in her bag; and Grady seeks a permit from the state of Oregon to dig for treasure on a local beach. Bill takes on both of their cases, which, on the face of it, aren't related. When the two cases collide in ways that seem too fantastic to be true, Bill finds himself caught in the middle.
How Thaddeus and Bill, Abby and Grady, assorted law enforcement officials and colorful hangers-on overlap and interconnect took Bill another nineteen years to puzzle out. The result is an intricate and original legal yarn with a cast of provincial misfits so peculiar and charming it reads like fiction.
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- New York : Bloomsbury, 2006.
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