Flash Point (novel)

But perhaps because of his many years of legal practice, he was also equally at home in filling his narratives with other types of characters: sleazy strip-club owners, tough and semi-crooked policemen, hard-bitten union officials, factory workers, relentless and unscrupulous Intelligent agents, and a wide variety of hard-boiled villains and crooks from small-time burglars and con men to gangster chieftains.

Much of the ensuing book takes place in lawyer's chambers, magistrates' courts, newspaper offices, and the occasional meeting between high government officials, including the Prime Minister himself.

[1] Such is the case in Flash Point, although Jonas Killey himself, the uncompromising instigator of so much national drama, ends up in surprisingly benign circumstances in totally different, non-legalist surroundings.

Newgate Callendar, the mystery critic of the New York Times, gave it a very favorable review, saying that: Michael Gilbert's FLASH POINT (Harper & Row, $6.95) examines certain aspects of the British Parliamentary system and does not like what it sees.

Gilbert, himself a lawyer, works up a situation where, in an effort to stop a legal case, the British Government steps in and subverts the basic rights of citizens.