Preview of Defending Billy Ryan Summary:

The social concerns of Defending Billy Ryan are familiar ones for readers of Higgins's fiction: Ambitious prosecutors pursue a case against Billy Ryan, the good-old-boy Commissioner of Public Works for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The realpolitik of the American legal system, good-old-boy networks, political peculations, Massachusetts, and Irish-American families — these are Higgins's perenniel concerns. He handles them here with accustomed ease and expertise.

The central theme of Defending...