'The Legal Limit,' by Martin Clark

This is the sort of book Graham Greene used to call "an entertainment" -- which is to say, sufficient skillful attention has been paid to the niceties of plot to make the story enjoyable reading, while the moral and social contexts have been treated with enough sophistication to make them engrossing but not overbearing. It is, in other words, fun you can think about.

What more could you ask from a novel to read on holiday?

Clark brings unusual credentials to what is essentially a legal thriller. Now 47, he's been a circuit court judge in a small Virginia town since the age of 32. He's the author of two previous novels, both highly praised. In "The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living" (2000), a judge bored with his life and estranged from his wife sets off with his pot-addled brother on a picaresque journey to recover a very strange woman's allegedly stolen money. In "Plain Heathen Mischief" (2004), a disgraced Baptist minister gets out of jail to find his wife divorcing him and the teenage girl he may or may not have seduced suing him for millions. He too sets off on a surreal road trip and may or may not find salvation in high-end insurance scams.

"The Legal Limit" is a darker, more grounded story, perhaps because -- as Clark informs us in a provocative first-person introduction and afterward -- the story is essentially a roman à clef on an actual case that came to his attention as a judge in Stuart, Va. The result is a kind of corkscrew riff on Cain and Abel told with a gritty sort of specificity that reflects the spirit, as well as the practice of criminal law. This one, in other words, is sort of Elmore Leonard meets John Grisham, but very smart and procedurally realistic -- think Scott Turow with lots of crackling Southern dialogue and a plot wound as tightly as a watch.

Bloody brothers

Gates and Mason are brothers in a small Virginia town -- sons to a fond and patient mother, survivors of a sadistic and brutally alcoholic father now gone. Gates is a dangerous screw-up in training; his younger brother Mason is a lawyer-to-be attending a Boston law school on scholarship. While home on holiday, Mason accompanies Gates on an evening out during which the older brother shoots a young man to death during a confrontation by the side of a rural road. There are no witnesses, and Mason concocts an alibi for his brother and disposes of the gun. It becomes a secret that binds them through the years. Decades later, Mason -- now a grieving widower and father to a beloved daughter -- finds himself back in his hometown as commonwealth attorney. Gates, meanwhile, has become a habitual felon, serving 44 years in prison for his part in a bungled cocaine ring.