'Double Tap' both disappoints and elates

"Double Tap." By Steve Martini. Putnam. 432 Pages, $26.95.

Steve Martini writes first-rate legal thrillers. His plotting is expert, his characters vivid and alive. His courtroom scenes are rich and credible, and so are his villains.

His hero, Paul Madriani, makes a likable and convincing David among the goliaths of crime, corporations and government.

In short, Martini usually delivers a mean page-turner.

All the more reason, then, to lament that his latest, "Double Tap," is a disappointment. But only as a thriller, for it contains something else that is so unexpected and moving that the book deserves to be recommended anyway.

Madelyn Chapman is a vivacious, Ferrari-driving, art-collecting titan of the California software industry who walks into her home one day and is shot to death. The suspect is Emiliano Ruiz, a mysterious ex-military man who had been doing security work for Chapman, had an affair with her and then was dumped. He is accused of having killed her out of jealousy.

Madriani takes the case, and soon starts picking threads that seem to lead toward the extensive business Chapman's company was doing with the U.S. government. Madriani comes to believe his client is innocent and that the real reason Chapman was killed was her resistance to the government's using her software to wire itself into the private life of every American citizen. His problem is Ruiz's reticence about his military past, and the iceberg of evidence threatening to sink his reticent client.

At this point the reader has begun to savor the expectation of quintessential Martini: Madriani the knight in shining armor riding forth to slay the dragons of bureaucratic malfeasance. Except that somehow it doesn't come off this time.

Sure, the author re-creates courtroom procedure with his usual expertise. The problem is the procedure - too much of it: long witness interrogations establishing sizes of bullets, their technical dimensions, their way of fragmenting, the wounds they cause, and so on and so on until the reader is skimming frantically to the end of the chapter. The denouement is unsatisfactory, and there's something unconvincing about the revelation of the villain's identity.

And yet....

Martini is a very fine writer, period. Just read the opening chapter of "Critical Mass" with its heart-stopping description of a ship in a storm. And in "Double Tap," a subplot about Madriani-Martini's Uncle Evo is alone worth the price of the book.

Evo fought in the Korean War and came back a nervous wreck consumed by survivor guilt and the torment of electric shock therapy. Incapable of functioning as a normal member of society, he is one of the walking wounded, his once-happy features replaced by "the thousand-yard stare... my uncle's undeviating expression, the haunted look that for decades was Evo's death-like gaze."

Much of Evo's life is told from the perspective of a boy remembering his uncle sitting in the family living room, silent and gazing into space. "At times I could not help but look at him in fascination and fright until my father would gently call my name and shake his head, a message that this was not polite."

Each time Martini returns to Evo, the man's pain and helplessness reveal themselves anew and in greater depth. Evo's story doesn't take up much of the novel, but it feels like a story Martini has been waiting a long time to tell.

Why now? Perhaps the war in Iraq was the catalyst. The elegiac final page of "Double Tap" makes us feel how real and how dreadful the consequences of the Korean War were for this American family.