Maxine Justice: Galactic Attorney
by Daniel SchwabauerGenres: Fiction / Science Fiction / General
Length: 8:55
Published on March 8, 2022
Format: Audiobook Source: Audible
Can Justice Save the Earth from Extinction?
Maxine Justice is an ambulance-chasing lawyer desperate for relevance and cash when aliens hire her to represent them before the United Nations. An off-planet consortium wants to heal humanity of every natural disease in exchange for 30% of Earth’s gold reserves.
The deal launches Max to legal stardom and makes her an international target for assassins. MediCorp, Star Cross, PharFuture—the big medical companies all have good reasons to want Max out of the way. Worse, she discovers her alien clients may be planning something more sinister than anyone has imagined.
Can a lawyer who failed the bar exam three times find some way to save the world from global and interstellar conspiracies? Or will humankind’s future end in a galactic courtroom?
An attorney named Maxine Justice? That’s a little heavy-handed, right? That’s the point. In this story, Maxine has just opened her own law firm (after getting fired) and changed her name so when people hear the name Maxine Justice, LLC they will know she will work for them. So far, it isn’t going so well. She’s behind on her rent at work and at home. She hasn’t paid her only employee for 6 weeks. She can’t even afford cat food or groceries. Things are so bad that she decides to pick up an overnight stint as a public defender at night court for 200 koppas and 20 koppas worth of vending machine credit.
The world building in this book is superb. Night court takes place in the bowels of a colosseum. It is presided over by android judges. If a jury is requested it is selected from a pool of people who are watching the night court feed. They vote right away.
Maxine’s night goes typically badly but then she is approached by some spectators with a very strange offer. They want her to go to the U.N. and offer a serum to heal the entire world of genetic defects in exchange of 30% of the Earth’s refined gold. She is so hard up that she convinces herself that even insane scientists need lawyers. Especially rich insane scientists who put her up in high class office space and pay her more money than she has ever seen, right?
This book is fun and snarky and fast paced. Everything is crashing and burning in Maxine’s world and she is trying to put a positive spin on it. She is required to do court ordered weekly therapy with a pastroid named Counselor Singh. She resents this when she has so much else to do but he becomes a trusted friend. Other than him and her assistant Kenjiro, she has no idea who she can trust.
I listened to this on audio and it was wonderful. I’d recommend this for anyone who like light science fiction with sassy heroines who are trying to make their way in the world despite the odds being stacked against them.
Content Warning
I was surprised when I finished this book to find that this was put out by a Christian publisher. I didn’t expect that. I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t seen it mentioned in the comments on Goodreads. There isn’t much in the way of overt Christianity in the book. Counselor Singh is an android who is programmed as a Christian counselor. That is discussed. (Seriously, Singh, though? That’s a traditionally Sikh name.) His preferred method of counseling though is to put people in an hypnotic trance while they watch him play first-person shooter video games. There is no heavy-handed Christian talk here. I get my hackles up when there is so I would have noticed. Don’t let that put you off this book.
