Primal Fear Books

I have never written a review of a book before, but I was reading a review of another book I had just read and the author of that review said if you want to read a true legal thriller you need to read this book. I could not find it in the bookstores so I ordered it via amazon.com.

I thought the book started out kind of slow and I did not care for the use of the "F" word a few times at the beginning. I like to recommend books to my mother in law and that might stop me from recommending this one, but maybe not. Once I got into the book there was not an excessive amount of profanity and I could not put the book down.

I really like John Grisham books and this one ranks up there with Grisham's best. I highly recommended it if you have not read it already.

This was a marvelous read. Fast, frenetic--- keeps you on your toes. I would recommend this to my friends who love thrillers.

William Diehl, Primal Fear (Villard, 1993)

As I continued on through this book, discovering its many flaws, I wondered more than once if the reason I kept reading it was, at least in part, my extreme regard for Gregory Hoblit's amazing film adaptation. It's one of those rare cases (Psycho and Silence of the Lambs are the most obvious examples) where a director took a mediocre novel and really made it his own, with the resulting movie being better than the book could have ever hoped. And yet, a day after I started reading Primal Fear, I was three hundred pages into it.

There's a difference between an author who can write and a book that's well-written. I've been thinking about this over the past few days. I think the distinction, ultimately, derives from what's important to the author. A well-written book is in love with language. It is painstakingly checked for errors, each word has been chosen with care (there are some books, such as Wendy Walker's The Secret Service, where I've actually wondered, idly, how much time the author spent considering the placement of each "the"), the book was written with an eye to the overall beauty and mellifluousness of the words just as much as to plot, characterization, pacing, all that sort of thing. But a book does not have to be well-written to show evidence that an author can write. (When reading this, imagine emphasis on the word "write," in kind of the same way you might say, "dude... that guy can drink", after the guy next to you at the bar has just put back his fifteenth shot of Yukon Jack and shows no signs of disorientation.) It is possible to have cultivated a fantastic feel for one or two of the major structural components of a novel without having quite grasped the rest. I'm not exactly sure how such books actually get published (this may stem from my just having finished Noah Lukeman's excellent The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile, which assures the avid reader/writer that stuff like this gets tossed out the window unless you're, say, Danielle Steel), but man, someone, somewhere, had to okay The Da Vinci Code.

Not to say Primal Fear is as flat-out bad as The Da Vinci Code. Diehl, while seemingly uncaring about the language itself-- while the phrase "riddled with clichés" has become something of a cliché in itself, it's quite an apt description of the writing here, and that's only the tip of the linguistic iceberg-- knows how to plot and pace. When an author doesn't spring the big twist on you until halfway through the book, and you don't care, that's pretty impressive.

In case you've been living under a rock since 1996, the plot: a sleazy, but very good, defense attorney, Martin Vail, wins a big case against the city of Chicago for police brutality against a minor mafioso. In revenge, they set him to defend Aaron Stampler, accused of killing the city's most beloved Catholic cardinal, found shivering in the confessional with the cardinal's blood all over him, the knife in his hand, wearing the cardinal's ring. An open and shut case, right? Well, you've seen Twelve Angry Men...

Unlike most courtroom dramas, this one spends most of its time outside the courtroom, with the first three hundred or so pages of the book devoted to Vail and his team trying to unravel the mystery of who really did kill the cardinal. (That's the big twist I mentioned before.) Once that's out of the way, then we get to the courtroom-drama bit. And, along with the language, that's Primal Fear's biggest failing: this is a very linear book, almost videogame-like in its insistence that we have to solve problem A, fight the boss battle, and then go on to problem B. Even though it's an old cliché in itself that (unless you're Law and Order) the basic piece of mystery-flavored entertainment will have two threads of mystery going at once-- only to be wrapped up into one at the end, of course-- utilizing that particular cliché at least shows that the artist doing the creating is capable of juggling such things in such a way that it keeps you entertained. Diehl is either beyond that or simply not capable of it, given the linearity here. He's just not interested. He's relying on the big reveal to throw the reader off. And it does, somewhat, but the linear nature of the narrative makes him reach for stuff that comes naturally to authors who do it the other way (dramatic tension being the main example).

In any case, the short answer, though it's already far too late for that: eh, not awful. But the movie is much, much better. Not terribly often I get to say that. ***

I read this book a few years back and could not get it out of my mind. The ending was just such a surprise. I read it and immediately had to rent the movie. The book was better, although I thought the movie was very good and true to the novel. Edward Norton played his character wonderfully.

This is my favorite all-time suspense novel.

This book is my favourite novel of all time. The story line is fantastic and the ending is simply chilling. The complex and descriptive paragraphs are completley stunning. The way Diehl can keep the story flying along with unbelievable speed and excitment is a rare and raw talent and is a joy to read. Also, as well as being fantasic read, it is also fasinating-it reveals the world of the court room in all its glories, as well as looking in to the human brain. Fasinating! If you haven't read it shame on you! Read it, you haven't read a thriller untill you read a novel by William Diehl!

Wow! What an intriguing read. This topic has fascinated me since childhood. This book is well-researched. So well in fact that the details of some accounts are belabored painstakingly. That would be my only complaint, i.e. at times I was begging for the punchline to the account and got lost in the details.

Overall, well-done and very meticulously put together. If you have an interest in medicine, the history of medicine or anthropology, this book will be facinating. However, it definitley takes some patience to get through due to the level of detail (commented on above).

Jan Bondeson's Buried Alive, is a very interesting read, well thought out and researched, she presents both fact and folklore and trying to sift through historical accounts of people being buried alive only to be save either by grave robbers, or distraught loved ones who want to see their dearly departed one last time. Do I believe that people in history were accidentally buried alive, yes, but I believe that most were buried alive on purpose, who could find a more perfect crime, since the evidence is well, buried. I do tend to agree that media had a lot to do with keeping the fear alive with accounts of people being saved from a most horrible death. However with out these fears, we probably wouldn't have had research into science and medicine, imagine all the debate between doctors and scientist of the exact moment of death, was it the void of a heart beat, was it an unresponsive individual who didn't respond to his or her name called out three times, or could it be the fact that the supposed corpse did not move when flame was applied to their feet or hands.
Bondeson's book is an excellent read.