This is the latest Joe Bob review. Part of a so far thankless task, as not a single one has been posted. On the positive side, the last couple were accepted and approved by John exactly as I wrote them, so that makes me feel pretty damn good.

Enjoy!
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The 37th Amendment by Susan Shelley; Reviewed by Steve Chaput
Published by Writers Club Press; ISBN 0-595-23083-0

Ted Braden is an ad executive more concerned with keeping his clients and Hollywood studio heads happy than in politics. He is doing okay financially, with an ex-wife, young daughter and a long-time girlfriend. He also has season tickets to the Lakers and this is where things go wrong. A wager made with a fellow fan accidentally causes Ted to become a defense witness in a murder case. Unfortunately, it’s a high-profile case and the mayor of LA doesn’t want facts or inconsistencies to get in the way of a quick conviction.

When Ted discovers that his fellow fan may have been wrongly convicted and executed for a crime he did not commit, he decides to see if there is something he can do to clear the man’s name. It doesn’t take long for Ted to discover that the police and the mayor do not want this to happen.

In Shelley’s first novel she demonstrates that she has the potential to be a very good writer. However, entertainment seems to be secondary to the author’s political aims. Shelley’s argument is that the members Supreme Court have put themselves above the Constitution and interpret the Bill of Rights to fit their own political agendas of the moment. Her main beef seems to be with interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment, which she finds has been used to twist the original intention of the first ten.

Shelley sets up her ‘straw man’ arguments via a story that takes place in the Los Angeles of 2056. A near future world made better (if not utopian) by the passage of the 37th Amendment earlier in the century, which removed the concept of ‘due process’ and allowed the various states to formulate their laws without interference from the Federal government. In Shelley’s world this made the streets safe, and never mind if a Right or two got in the way, since they really didn’t matter anymore.

While the pace of the story is fast, Shelley occasionally brings everything to a screeching halt to go into arguments pro & con on everything from the First Amendment to the death penalty. Fortunately, she does leave most of the factual history of her ‘case’ for an appendix, which you can skim or ignore, depending on your interest in such things.

Sadly, because she seems more concerned with getting out her ‘message’, Shelley doesn’t allow her characters to really have much depth, with the exception of Ted. He’s the only one we really get to know and care about. Also, Shelley falls into a new writers trap of being in love with her descriptive powers so much that whole passages are filled up telling us about fashion and interior design. It’s also evident that Shelley has no fondness for reporters, and especially those networks anchors concerned more about how they look and sound than with the stories they cover. Ratings are everything in this future, which really doesn’t differ much from our own. Two and a half stars.
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I'd be interested to see what Shelley would do without her political hat on. Once she gets going the story moves and sadly she feels so strongly about the issues she addresses that she stops everything dead for pages of argument.

Not highly recommended, but someone more conservative than I might disagree.