Meet Eddie Terrell, a successful fifty-one-year old Carolina litigator. Followers of author E. Vernon F. Glenn may recall Eddie as the lonely lawyer in his heart-warming children’s book, You Never Know Who Your Angels Are. Eddie is duly resurrected here in YOU HAVE YOUR WAY, a legal thriller undoubtedly pitched at an adult readership. Creative writing courses generally advocate that authors write about what they know, and it quickly becomes apparent that this writer is more than familiar with his subject matter. The plot spins around the protagonist’s expertise in legal matters and how the law can be manipulated and exploited. This is exemplified in the numerous anecdotal incidents that punctuate this novel, and is the driving force behind the primary storyline. This authenticity is compounded by evoking the novel’s setting, predominantly through local dialect – replete with the familiar and ubiquitous ‘y’all’.
The narrative begins with the pairing of Eddie and glamorous insurance investigator Gigi Faye Erin, who have joined forces to unravel a jewel fraud case. Stopped by law enforcement on the drive home from their mission, Eddie is deemed unfit to drive and ordered to spend the night at Gigi’s apartment. The consequence of this night with Gigi is that Eddie’s volatile relationship with his long-term live-in girlfriend is brought to an explosive finale and finds Eddie hot-footing to Montana in order to draw a line under this domestic drama. Here Eddie meets Mikey, a thirty-something hairdresser who is ripe for a little excitement in her life. With remarkable ease, Mikey is persuaded to return to the Carolinas with Eddie and become his first recruit to a ‘syndicate’ he is putting together – the details of which he explains in only the vaguest of terms. It becomes obvious to the reader at this point that Eddie is prepared to use his legal know-how to draw outside the lines. Aided and abetted by his rather motley crew of investors and comrades (each armed with their own colorful history), Eddie proceeds with his convoluted plan that most definitely necessitates operating outside of the law.
YOU HAVE YOUR WAY spans forty-seven chapters, each one the title of a well-known song and loosely encompassing the content of the chapter. Is this a touch of structural genius or a writerly indulgence? The jury is out. What does add coherence is the novel’s title, presumably taken from a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche, meaning that everyone has their own way of doing things and therefore there should be no judgment. This is, at least, consistent with the depiction of Eddie as some kind of modern-day Robin Hood. And while some readers may balk at the almost carnal descriptions of female characters and their universal adoration of Eddie–fiction, after all, is the natural habitat of the implausible.
Written with a hefty dose of obvious legal expertise, E. Vernon F. Glenn’s YOU HAVE YOUR WAY is a slow-burn southern thriller that follows the adventures Eddie Terrell, a successful litigator and somewhat lost soul.
~Amanda Ellison for IndieReader