Those Empty Eyes

The legal thriller is a subgenre of crime fiction centering on the lives and work of legal professionals. Legal thrillers typically feature similar plot elements: They often feature a courtroom drama that positions a lawyer as a heroic figure. Legal thrillers sometimes focus on the lives of other legal professionals, such as judges or investigators. Because nearly all legal thrillers deal with justice systems and the process of determining what justice looks like, these stories tend to examine similar themes, such as whether a legal system can deliver truly reparative forms of justice; how society conceptualizes and copes with criminality; and whether objective “truth” really exists, as well as whose subjectivity is privileged in making this determination?

Prominent examples of contemporary legal thrillers include John Grisham’s body of work (The Firm, The Rainmaker, and The Pelican Brief, among others), Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent and The Burden of Proof, and Jilliane Hoffmann’s Retribution. In addition, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is often considered a foundational text in the modern legal thriller subgenre, since it encompasses many tropes and themes common in these stories.

Those Empty Eyes both engages and subverts the elements of the legal thriller. The novel opens with a courtroom drama that uses the structure of the trial of the Quinlan murders to create tension. As the title of this section, “The Final Witness,” suggests, the trial’s success or failure depends on the testimony of the final witness, who is the protagonist in the rest of the novel. As noted in the Chapter Analysis for Interlude I and Part I, this section’s structure, which oscillates between the trial and the Quinlan murders, allows for “objective” consideration of the details of what happened to the Quinlans versus the testimonies presented during the trial. In this way, the novel engages many of the questions central to the legal thriller genre about the nature of truth and the ability of courtroom proceedings to expose or produce this truth.

During this opening trial, the novel focuses on lawyer Garrett Lancaster, thus engaging the legal thriller trope of lawyer-as-hero. The text ultimately subverts this trope, however, by revealing that both Garrett and the partner in his firm, Jacqueline, are the killers whom Alex seeks (and are using their status as lawyers to identify and murder perpetrators of sex crimes against minors and those who witness such crimes yet remain silent). This subversion is thematically significant, since the novel explores whether existing legal institutions can serve lasting, restorative justice. The novel’s response to the question is complicated: Alex, for example, is wrongly condemned by the legal system but then uses that same system to punish those who condemned her. Given the novel’s complex attitudes toward legal power, it follows that the characters mostly closely tied to the law would be ambiguously heroic and sometimes even downright villainous.

In addition, Those Empty Eyes engages the tropes of the subgenre by having Alex take a job as an investigator for a law firm, ironically becoming the employee of those who perpetrated her family’s murders. This choice not only embroils Alex in the legal system without making her a lawyer but also allows her to be an active character with significant agency. She doesn’t fully understand the complex, nefarious history underpinning Lancaster & Jordan when she begins to work there, but she has the tools at her disposal to undercover that history and, in doing so, address her trauma so that she can truly move on.