(“A Cure for Night” by Justin Peacock, Doubleday, 341 pages, $24.95).

This debut novel by an author with a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University and a law degree from Yale University (what a combination!) is more than just another lawyer book. Joel Devereux is a flawed anti-hero, the associate lawyer of a top New York law firm who’s doing drugs with a female legal aide. That turns horribly bad when she overdoses and dies in a bathroom at the firm.

The result is that Joel is implicated in the death and moves from a $200,000 a year job as a corporate lawyer to a brand-new, $50,000-a-year job as a public defender who hopes that his drug exploits don’t become known.

This is a hard book. Many lawyer novels have revealed the strange life of associate lawyers in wealthy law firms and the troubles they endure. Justin Peacock, however, takes on the tough life of lawyers and clients at the low end of the legal profession, the public defenders who work on assembly line justice, pleading out cases so that the court system doesn’t implode.

It is a system where truth is secondary or irrelevant, and the courtroom is a place of combat where the best story wins. This becomes apparent when a racially tinged murder trial becomes high profile, and Joel is assigned second chair. The defendant is a black dealer working the streets, accused of murdering a white Brooklyn college student.

But wait, there’s more. Was the college student an innocent kid doing a sociology class study of street dealing, as presented by the prosecution, or was he actually involved in the trade? Were there rival gangs involved, and if so, who was the guilty party? It is up to Joel to find the answers, and he finds himself on a very hot seat.

Francis Moul, Ph.D., is an environmental historian.