It starts with a phonecall from the phone of a missing woman to a young lawyer. The young lawyer, Kelly Parks, recognises the caller ID from some less than savoury business her form was involved in several years previously. Bryson Coventry, homicide cop and part-time artist is the man heading up the investigation, but he soon finds things aren’t as cut and dried as they might appear. As Bryson tracks down a man who’s killed before and will kill again, Kelly finds her loyalties shaken and her world falling apart as secrets both personal and professional erupt in this debut thriller by Denver lawyer Jim Michael Hansen

Jim Michael Hansen – if we are to judge by Night Laws – may well be the love child of John Grisham and Thomas Harris, although thankfully he has more of Harris’ style about him. He knows the way to his reader’s hearts is through clear, solid prose and lead characters who are flawed but ultimately likeable. Like Harris – at least Harris before he wrote Hannibal – Hansen knows how to balance the conventional with the fantastic, coming up trumps both with his no-nonsense, fast moving prose and his believable, if somewhat glossy characters.

With eyes of two different colours (he wears contact lenses), a coffee addiction and a sideline in landscape paintings, Bryson Coventry is a cop who may act jaded but hasn’t suffered enough to let go of his strong sense of justice. He’s quirky enough to be memorable, strong enough to be a hero and, of course, like almost every other good guy in the world of the legal thriller, Coventry ain’t exactly unpopular with the ladies. If it sounds like you’ve met the Coventry archetype before, then you’re not mistaken. Hansen isn’t breaking the mould with his characters, but he still manages to imbue them with life, making them a cut-above the cookie-cutter legal thriller cast.

This cuts to the heart of Night Laws: there is nothing new here. But, like hearing a talented musician play standards, you find yourself entertained and drawn into the beat. Plotwise, Night Laws takes enough turns – some expected, some quite unexpected – to keep the reader moving and the solid prose manages to keep the reader involved in the glossy world of Hansen’s Denver.

In line with the glossy – sometimes almost soap-operatic – feel of Night Laws, everyone in this novel seems obsessed by sex. Characters constantly notice each other’s legs, abs and breasts. Strip clubs ain’t sleazy, they’re places of free expression. People get horny watching Basic Instinct on cable. This is a glossy, high-concept legal world and while it may feel over the top, it works according to its own rules. Reading the book you can see the glossy, high concept movie adaptation play out in your mind. This is a commercial thriller designed to thrill its readers while keeping them safe.

The sex theme – which adds to that high concept, Hollywood gloss – plays out even into the way one potential victim outsmarts the bad guy. This psychotic is both sexually vulnerable and sexually predatory at the same time, something which feels a little odd. But we accept this oddity because our killer is presented in a believable fashion. What is most interesting to me – especially considering how I feel about the psycho killer genre – is how little background he is given. We are – as ever – allowed inside his head, but these moments are not intrusive and don’t serve to give us pages of unnecessary back-story in order to “explain” him as a villain. This bad guy is just plain bad. Like Hannibal Lecter in the early days, we don’t need to know any more about him. He’s plain evil as hell, proving that when one tries to delve too hard into the psychopathy of this bogey-man kind of bad guy, the experiment more often than not goes belly up. Thank Goodness Hansen is smarter than that and manages to flesh out his bad guy in the moment, but keeps the sob-story history to the absolute bare minimum. Hansen comes up trumps with a bad guy who feels bad, who feels real and above all who presents a believable threat to his victim.

However, the high-gloss, plot driven world of Night Laws comes off as bland on occasion. Upon discovering a body, when one cop cries, “oops, there’s another one!” it rings false and its clear that Hansen’s people can treat death with the same flippancy they treat sex. Of course, its all just part of the genre Hansen’s working in, and those small intrusive moments of unreality don’t intrude often enough to destroy the book. What is missing, for this reviewer at least, is a deeply human connection to this world. We’re thrilled, we boo the bad guy and we cheer the good guys, but ultimately there is no real stake for us as readers, no moral quandary and no niggling questions left at the back of our minds. There is also sometimes a feeling that he’s channelling that Grisham/Harris/Patterson spirit just a little too well, making the individual stamp of the author seem just a little anonymous among the otherwise thrilling plot and prose. Night Laws’ major weaknesses come from the fact that it is a commercial thriller and that, in his excitement over plot, Hansen can make his characters seem a little less empathetic than perhaps he should. While he clearly cares for his leads, it’s the supporting cast who feel a little left out.

Night Laws is popcorn entertainment literature; the bad guys are bad, the good guys are good (but flawed just enough to keep them interesting) and despite the corruption in the system the law works. Hansen has an X-factor to his writing and an enthusiasm for his slickly twisting plot that keeps you turning those pages. His likeable prose, interesting (if glossy) lead characters and his knowledge of procedure make Night Laws a well-plotted thriller that knows its audience and gives them what they want in spades.

It’s an airport read, a high concept thrill-ride, the kind of popular thriller you can pick up, read, enjoy and put back down again. It’s not dumb, but it’s the kind of book where you don’t have to engage your moral centres and be prepared to answer difficult questions. This isn’t to put down Night Laws, because every once in a while, among all the social commentary and downbeat meditations on the nature of evil, we need to be reminded that sometimes the good guys win unequivocally and sometimes, even the most cynical of us can enjoy watching it happen. With Night Laws, we can indulge easily in that kind of pleasure and, more importantly, we have fun doing it!