The standard line on Kennedy for the Defense is that George V. Higgins, having finally returned to the criminal element of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, is once more back in form. It's a nice standard line since Kennedy is one wonderful book. But it misses the point—Higgins has always been far more interested in lawyers than in criminals….

Throughout his novels, there has been a consistent lawyerly point of view. Higgins's greatest peculiarity is not the celebrated "ear" for dialogue, much noted when Eddie Coyle first came out, but rather his discovery that F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous dictum was an equation that could be reversed. With Higgins, Character is Action. Indeed, what action there is invariably occurs in the past tense—precisely the way it does in a lawyer's office. The concerns of his characters are lawyerly, too: they wish neither the solutions to mysteries nor...