{"id":1349,"date":"2014-05-31T16:57:31","date_gmt":"2014-05-31T22:57:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=1349"},"modified":"2014-05-31T16:57:31","modified_gmt":"2014-05-31T22:57:31","slug":"nancy-allen-the-code-of-the-hills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/nancy-allen-the-code-of-the-hills\/","title":{"rendered":"Nancy Allen: The Code of the Hills"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Code-of-the-Hills\"<\/a>Nancy Allen refers to her first novel as \u201chillbilly noir\u201d but I\u2019d call it \u201clegal noir,\u201d as it\u2019s a harrowing, inside look at the legal system and its many faults. It\u2019s also a harrowing look at life in a small town in the Ozarks: Barton, Missouri. Allen\u2019s main character is a prosecutor named Elsie who apparently has the world\u2019s most horrible boss and she\u2019s working on the world\u2019s most horrible case.<\/p>\n

I think folks who work sex crimes are probably vastly underpaid for the heartbreaking and soul-sucking work they do \u2013 unless they are each paid a million bucks a year, they\u2019re working for us for free. Despite Elsie\u2019s flaws and blind spots she\u2019s still fighting to do what\u2019s right because that\u2019s the way she works. Elsie has a special soft spot for child victims, and the case she\u2019s assigned in this novel is a doozy.<\/p>\n

Charlene, Kristy and Tiffany Taney live with their brute of a father and their wreck of a mother, only now the dad is in jail and charged with rape. The mother had been abused herself as a child and takes it almost as a given. As Elsie points out to her boss the holes in their case preparation and goes to interview the girls, she\u2019s horrified by the details.<\/p>\n

While Elsie\u2019s boss is a stumbling block she\u2019s given able assistance by the sympathetic and practical Detective Ashlock. She\u2019s also juggling a new romance with a hunky cop, Noah, though their schedules make it hard for them to get together. Elsie\u2019s boss is politically motivated and unavailable whenever Elsie needs her, so the details and work of the case fall to her, and Allen gives the reader an excellent look at the ways a legal case is meticulously assembled.<\/p>\n

After the father is charged Elsie is targeted by a \u201cmen\u2019s rights\u201d group who think no one should interfere with the head of the household. She\u2019s also subjected to a series of humiliating pranks which leave her nervous and unsettled.<\/p>\n

Her witnesses, who are, after all, children, need a lot of hand holding and preparation, and the opposing lawyer is eager to discredit them even though they are children. Allen throws plenty of road blocks in Elsie\u2019s path as she steers her way through what is in every way a difficult case. As a reader you want the father in prison as much as she does \u2013\u00a0the idea of him getting to tiny six year old Tiffany at some point is completely chilling.<\/p>\n

Whether Allen meant to or not \u2013 and she\u2019s not writing a polemic \u2013 this is a truly feminist novel in the way it looks at the different ways women are powerless or made to feel that way in our society, starting, as she illustrates graphically, sometimes when they are children. Early on Elsie thinks to herself, \u201cAs women practicing law in the Ozarks, both Elsie and Bree had to battle for respect\u2026\u201d Neither woman plans to go down without a fight \u2013 or at all \u2013 but they are at times fighting a very uphill battle.<\/p>\n

Allen also makes some strong points about battered women throughout the novel, something she really reinforces through her storytelling toward the end of the book. If this book doesn\u2019t make you fighting mad, Allen probably hasn\u2019t done her job. While I never doubted the final outcome, the plot twists were enough to keep me turning pages non-stop as I got to the end, and I didn\u2019t quickly stop thinking about Allen\u2019s story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nancy Allen refers to her first novel as \u201chillbilly noir\u201d but I\u2019d call it \u201clegal noir,\u201d as it\u2019s a harrowing, inside look at the legal system and its many faults. It\u2019s also a harrowing look at life in a small town in the Ozarks: Barton, Missouri. Allen\u2019s main character is a prosecutor named Elsie who … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[21],"class_list":["post-1349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-legal-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1349"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1351,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions\/1351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}