Mouse in the Box
Be-Stirred Book Review #4 is Mouse in the Box - by Lewis Allan
My connection to the author(s): Per the author’s note, this book is written by two authors: one is a veteran criminal defense attorney, and the other is a freelance writer. I met one of the two at the Killer Nashville writer’s conference last year, and we later connected over email.
Book Synopsis:
The main character, Mason Mitchell, is a jaded, hard-drinking, pragmatic, and highly competent criminal defense attorney in Wisconsin who finds himself enmeshed in two challenging cases:
The first defendant is Michael Key, a man accused of killing his wife. A high-profile civil rights lawyer takes his case and hires Mason as a “local expert” of source, but things take a dangerous turn when violent protests and assassination attempts propel Mitchell into the spotlight of a courtroom thriller where everything seems stacked against him.
The secondary case–and storyline–centers on Lori, a woman accused of stabbing her abusive husband at a party. Through her correspondence with Mason, her defense attorney, we glimpse her experience in the system, both inside and out.
These parallel storylines touch on hot-button issues like racism and racial profiling, domestic violence, substance abuse, recidivism, poverty and privilege in the context of a criminal justice system for a major Midwest metropolitan area. Its characters include good, bad, and mediocre lawyers, judges, offenders, defendants and law enforcement personnel. The beauty of Mouse in the Box, however, is that it shows them all in a human light, subject to the mistakes, biases, and fallacies of all mankind to fool and be fooled; and how good folks fight for justice for the right reasons while the bad and mediocre manipulate or sensationalize their concept of “justice” to serve their own ends.
What I Learned:
Mouse in the Box is an in-depth case study of how the criminal justice system works in theory and in practice. Although the story is fiction (and told very well, in my opinion), it feels very believable–in fact, I wondered if the authors had modeled the story off of real cases.
I learned a lot while reading this book about how our criminal justice system functions (both in theory and in reality) at the local level. In the interest of brevity, however, I want to focus on one particular lesson that touched a nerve for me.
Twenty years ago this month, the atrocities committed by U.S. Soldiers at the detention facilities in Abu Ghurayb and elsewhere in the “War on Terror'' came to light. I had just finished my first tour in Iraq as a U.S. Army intelligence officer and was less than six weeks away from the start of my second. Like many of my colleagues, I was appalled the torture itself and how “we” . It was not until we studied lessons learned from that incident years later that I realized the fine–and false–distinction between “enhanced interrogation techniques” and torture. And that neither is truly effective at garnering truthful and useful intelligence or other information.
As I was finishing up Mouse, my husband and I watched the Netflix Documentary, “American Nightmare,” which showcases how various cognitive biases and presupposition of guilt negatively impact law enforcement officers during investigations. There were eerie parallels between what I watched, what I knew about Abu Ghurayb, and what I was reading in this book.
Aspects of both of these real life scenarios materialized when “Mouse in the Box” character Michael Key was first interrogated at the police station and, later, when his defense lawyer, Mason Mitchell, brought an expert witness to testify about how law enforcement officers “should” interview suspects versus how they legally “could” interview suspects. Specifically, I learned:
About the two main categories of interview techniques law enforcement officers are taught
That interrogation tactics like sleep deprivation, isolation, and fabrication of information are permitted (and sometimes even encouraged) during some interrogations, despite the fact that all of them frequently lead to false confessions. (Seriously - is lying to someone really an effective way to get them to tell you the truth?)
That often there are no counter-balancing presences or mechanisms to mitigate the effect of interrogators’ cognitive biases or accusatory techniques.
I won’t spoil the outcome of Michael Key’s trial here, but it is incredibly well put together!
How you can experience the story: Mouse in the Box is available in paperback, audiobook, and e-book editions at Amazon, Bookshop.org, and other online retailers.
