DATE: Thursday, April 3, 1997               TAG: 9704030055

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E7   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY RICKEY WRIGHT 

                                            LENGTH:   71 lines

``SILENT WITNESS'' HAS HIGH POINTS BUT LASTS TOO LONG

THE LEGAL thriller has grabbed nearly enough of the popular fiction market in the past decade to rival the legal profession itself as a lucrative force. With books such as ``Degree of Guilt,'' Richard North Patterson has pulled himself up to the rarefied heights attained by hit-makers John Grisham and Scott Turow.

``Silent Witness,'' Patterson's eighth novel, sits near the top of best-seller lists. If sheer heft indicates a good reading investment, this book is a winner.

But even after delivering an impressively shocking twist ending, ``Silent Witness'' doesn't quite justify the hard labor to reach it. The book is too long by a third, with Patterson taking his own sweet time to get points across and tell a story that's just not that complicated.

In his favor, it must be said that the bones of what Patterson has to offer are more than acceptable material. Star attorney Tony Lord returns to his hometown of Lake City, Ohio, to defend his troubled best friend, track coach Sam Robb, against a murder charge in the death of a female athlete who was pregnant by Sam.

Tony's visit stirs mixed feelings far beyond those elicited by Sam's predicament. In 1967, Tony's girlfriend, Alison Taylor, was killed. Although he was taken off the hook by the discovery of another suspect, the file remains open. Alison's parents and others take great offense at Tony's defense of Sam.

What ensues has its fascinating moments, but there's too much here to allow ``Silent Witness'' to move efficiently. Tony's emotions and motivations are laid out neatly, with his ambivalence front and center. His friendship with Sam's wife, Sue, is given thoughtful space, but Sam remains something of a cipher, perhaps more than is necessary to justify Lake City's, and Tony's, doubts about him.

If anything, Patterson tries to put too much feeling on the page. The 1960s portion of the book is filled with signs of Tony's gathering social awareness. Someone might have warned Patterson against including the cliched memories of the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations that, we are made to understand, spark Tony.

In addition to this clumsy stuff (``The California presidential primary election was today, he remembered'' - yeah, right), some jarring anachronisms are scattered along the early pages too. A shag haircut in 1968?

But for the frank talk of non-missionary-position sex and condoms that permeates Sam's trial, and a couple of too-glib references to the O.J. Simpson criminal case, there's little to place later events in their time.

These are older versions of the friends who grew up and then apart, but it's difficult to grasp their relationships beyond the obvious. One of the most striking partnerships in ``Silent Witness'' is that of Tony with his mentor, Saul Ravin, the lawyer who helped him fight murder accusations.

Tony commits a betrayal or two of his own, most baldly in throwing suspicion on fellow Lake City alum Ernie Nixon - who is literally the only black man in town and pretty clearly innocent. This message about less than heroic counsel is hard to miss, and to his credit, Patterson doesn't try to excuse his main character for this ugly work.

This book is hardly a failure, although its flaws are occasionally real howlers. Still, those with the patience to ride it out until the end will find ``Silent Witness'' a raw reminder of the old saw about all of American life being nothing more than a repeat of high school. MEMO: Rickey Wright is a Norfolk-based free-lance writer and critic. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic

BOOK REVIEW

``Silent Witness

Author: Richard North Patterson

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf.

493 pp.

Price: $25.95

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