April Fool works on just about every level. Deverell’s prose is evocative and complete, his characters beautifully drawn and fully realized. The story opens in a small community on the west coast of Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, Canada, where a retired jewel thief is wrongly accused of murder. The jewel thief calls on his old lawyer, Arthur Beauchamp--himself retired, remarried, and living in splendid semi-isolation on a fictional island in Canada’s Gulf Islands chain. (Deverell calls it Garibaldi; those in the know say it’s Pender Island, where Deverell maintains a residence).As April Fool begins, a brouhaha is about to break out on Garibaldi over the nesting rights of eagles and the real-estate developer that would evict them.
Deverell moves us from the rugged wilderness of Canada’s westernmost coast, to the inner sanctums of a top Vancouver law firm, to the courtroom, and even to Europe, where we see the jewel thief back in action. A strong environmental thread is woven tightly through this novel--those eagles, of course--but Deverell resists the urge to preach and even manages to play some of the enviro types for laughs.
This is not the first appearance for legal eagle Arthur Beauchamp, who pops up periodically in Deverell’s fiction. He was first seen in Dance of the Shiva (1984) and again in Trial of Passion (1996), winner of the both the Dashiell Hammett and Arthur Ellis awards.
Attorney Beauchamp is a consistent delight. The best trial lawyer around--a sort of Clarence Darrow of Canada’s west coast--outside of the courtroom he battles insecurities about his new wife, his new life, and more mundane things, such as how to do laundry and feed himself when his life partner ends up in a tree to protest the environmental changes happening on their island.
Part courtroom drama, part classic whodunit, and part emotional drama with a humorous edge, April Fool is good fiction, no matter which part you examine.
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