A compelling courtroom drama

The System Ryan Gattis MCD

Ryan Gattis is best known for All Involved (2015), a blood-soaked, mesmerizing novel about rival gangs exploiting the chaos of the 1992 race riots in Gattis's home city of Los Angeles to embark on an epic rally of retaliatory murders. His new book, taking place a few months on, has a narrower focus, attempting, Law and Order-style, to illuminate the workings of the U.S. justice system by following an attempted murder case from initial investigation to trial.

This case really throws a googly at “the system” because of the two defendants, one happens to be guilty and one is innocent.

We know from the start that the perp was Omar “Wizard” Tavira, tasked with offing the victim because her drug dealing was encroaching on the territory of his own gang. We also know that his pal Jacob “Dreamer” Safulu was not involved, but has been fitted up by Wizard's parole officer Phillip Petrillo, who has the hots for Dreamer's girlfriend.

The book is the fruit of six years of research and there are all sorts of details that ring true: the description of the best method of safely secreting a weapon inside yourself in prison, so that you're always protected (“Better being uncomfortable than being dead”); the cop complaining that budget cuts have deprived him of his best asset (the air con with which he can freeze people in the interrogation room until they're ready to spill the beans).

I can believe that the realism extends to Gattis's vibrant, sympathetic portraits of his gang members, hereditary criminals with no way of escaping the “system” they're born into, but one gets the impression he thinks Petrillo, a Rush Limbaugh-loving racist with a tendency to slip into clichéd evilness, is less deserving of the privilege of a nuanced portrayal. It's one of many instances of food for thought that the book offers, in addition to being the most compelling courtroom drama I have read this year.