To Honor and Obey - Hardcover

Taylor, Lawrence

3.2

5 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688098541 ISBN 13: 9780688098544

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1992

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Describes how a man known as the "Woman's Lawyer" helped a conventional Park Avenue society woman remember the events that had caused her to shove a knife through her estranged husband's heart. 35,000 first printing. $20,000 ad/promo.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

An engrossing but frustrating legal procedural by Taylor (A Trial of Generals, 1981; Trail of the Fox, 1980) that traces attorney Michael Dowd's defense of LuAnn Fratt when the New York socialite was tried for the murder of her estranged husband. Fratt was an enigmatic figure, her life seemingly a shallow round of visits to benefit balls and beauty salons. In a call to 911, and during later police interrogations, Fratt freely admitted that at about 2:30 in the morning of November 2, 1988, she left her million-dollar East Side co-op, an eight-inch kitchen knife in her Vuitton bag, walked a block or two to the studio apartment occupied by Charles Kennedy Poe Fratt since the marital breakup, and stabbed the wealthy executive to death. Afterward, Fratt appeared preternaturally calm, evincing no tears, no excitement, no hysterics. During the course of pretrial conversations, however, she confided to Dowd that her husband had raped her once in the months preceding his death and again on the night of the murder. The lawyer decided to base his case on self-defense and to explain Fratt's impassivity as a manifestation of ``rape trauma syndrome.'' Psychiatric experts were called to testify, though the presiding judge rigorously limited their testimony. As an array of prosecution witnesses pointed out discrepancies in the socialite's story, things did not look promising for Fratt or Dowd. The jury, however, decided in the defendant's favor. And it is in detailing this final phase of the trial that Taylor nearly destroys the impact of his narrative: He fails to provide any indication of just what elements in Dowd's strategy prompted the jury's decision. This gap in continuity leaves the reader perplexed and uncertain as to whether or not Dowd's unconventional defense may have been mainly a gimmick. Overall, though, involving and provocative. (Eight pages of b&w photos--not seen.) -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

One fall dawn in 1988, wealthy Upper East Side Manhattanite Louann Fratt, mother of three, went to the apartment of her estranged husband, Charles, to whom she had been married for 30 years, and fatally stabbed him. After reporting her crime to the police, she retained as counsel scruffy-looking Michael Dowd, a downtown lawyer in every sense, famed for his pro bono defenses of battered women. The curious thing about this re-creation of a case of no particular true-crime excitement is that we learn more about Dowd than about the Fratts. Taylor ( Trail of the Fox ) only superficially probes the wife's life as depersonalized handmaiden to a demanding husband who discarded her in middle age for another woman. At trial, pleading self-defense against her husband's attempted rape, Louann Fratt was found not guilty. So intense is the book's concentration on Dowd, however, that we're told not only his every utterance but virtually his every thought about this case and his others as well. The book proves to be less a defense of the suspect than of her attorney, who, we learn in an epilogue, in 1990 was suspended from practice for five years for paying bribes to a politician, an injustice, argues Taylor, since Dowd was the whistle-blower. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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