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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780345388773
ISBN number: 0345388771
Label: Ballantine Books
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 432
Printing Date: April 02, 1994
Publishing house: Ballantine Books
Release Date: April 02, 1994
Sale Popularity Level: 260188
Studio: Ballantine Books
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
'Spine-tingling...Mr. Diehl can sustain suspense.'
THE NEW YORKTIMES
Martin Vail, the brilliant 'bad-boy' lawyer every prosecutor and politician love to hate, is defending Aaron Stampler, a man found holding a bloody butcher's knife near a murdered archbishop. Vail is certain to lose, but Vail uses his unorthodox ways to good advantage when choosing his legal team--a tight group of men and women who must uncover the extraordinary truth behind the archbishop's slaughter. They do, in a heart-stopping climax unparalleled for the surprise it springs on the reader...
Amazon.com Review:
In Chicago, a sainted archbishop is murdered, mutilated, and dismembered in his rectory. Aaron Stampler, an angelic-looking young man, is found crouched in a confessional, covered with blood, clutching a butcher's knife, swearing his innocence.
Martin Vail is the brilliant lawyer every prosecutor and politician loves to hate. It is up to him to defend Stampler, the young human monster. But very first he must uncover the horrifying truth about the crime.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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This is my very first book by this author, and I hope to read the subsequent two in this series. I was saddened to learn of the author's death.
Primal Fear is a real legal-psychological thriller. I suspected the ending, but it still was a shocker the way it was presented. I have not seen the movie, and probably wouldn't have guessed the ending had Law & Order SVU not done a similar story like it.
Highly recommend!
Rated by buyers -
I have never written a review of a book before, but I was reading a review of another book I had just read and the author of that review said if you want to read a true legal thriller you need to read this book. I could not find it in the bookstores so I ordered it via amazon.com.
I thought the book started out kind of slow and I did not care for the use of the "F" word a few times at the beginning. I like to recommend books to my mother in law and that might stop me from recommending this one, but maybe not. Once I got into the book there was not an excessive amount of profanity and I could not put the book down.
I really like John Grisham books and this one ranks up there with Grisham's best. I highly recommended it if you have not read it already.
Rated by buyers -
This was a marvelous read. Fast, frenetic--- keeps you on your toes. I would recommend this to my friends who love thrillers.
Rated by buyers 
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William Diehl, Primal Fear (Villard, 1993)
As I continued on through this book, discovering its many flaws, I wondered more than once if the reason I kept reading it was, at least in part, my extreme regard for Gregory Hoblit's amazing film adaptation. It's one of those rare cases (Psycho and Silence of the Lambs are the most obvious examples) where a director took a mediocre novel and really made it his own, with the resulting movie being better than the book could have ever hoped. And yet, a day after I started reading Primal Fear, I was three hundred pages into it.
There's a difference between an author who can write and a book that's well-written. I've been thinking about this over the past few days. I think the distinction, ultimately, derives from what's important to the author. A well-written book is in love with language. It is painstakingly checked for errors, each word has been chosen with care (there are some books, such as Wendy Walker's The Secret Service, where I've actually wondered, idly, how much time the author spent considering the placement of each "the"), the book was written with an eye to the overall beauty and mellifluousness of the words just as much as to plot, characterization, pacing, all that sort of thing. But a book does not have to be well-written to show evidence that an author can write. (When reading this, imagine emphasis on the word "write," in kind of the same way you might say, "dude... that guy can drink", after the guy subsequent to you at the bar has just put back his fifteenth shot of Yukon Jack and shows no signs of disorientation.) It is possible to have cultivated a fantastic feel for one or two of the major structural components of a novel without having quite grasped the rest. I'm not exactly sure how such books actually get published (this may stem from my just having finished Noah Lukeman's excellent The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile, which assures the avid reader/writer that stuff like this gets tossed out the window unless you're, say, Danielle Steel), but man, someone, somewhere, had to okay The Da Vinci Code.
Not to say Primal Fear is as flat-out bad as The Da Vinci Code. Diehl, while seemingly uncaring about the language itself-- while the phrase "riddled with clichés" has become something of a cliché in itself, it's quite an apt description of the writing here, and that's only the tip of the linguistic iceberg-- knows how to plot and pace. When an author doesn't spring the big twist on you until halfway through the book, and you don't care, that's pretty impressive.
In case you've been living under a rock since 1996, the plot: a sleazy, but very good, defense attorney, Martin Vail, wins a big case against the city of Chicago for police brutality against a minor mafioso. In revenge, they set him to defend Aaron Stampler, accused of killing the city's most beloved Catholic cardinal, found shivering in the confessional with the cardinal's blood all over him, the knife in his hand, wearing the cardinal's ring. An open and shut case, right? Well, you've seen Twelve Angry Men...
Unlike most courtroom dramas, this one spends most of its time outside the courtroom, with the very first three hundred or so pages of the book devoted to Vail and his team trying to unravel the mystery of who really did kill the cardinal. (That's the big twist I mentioned before.) Once that's out of the way, then we get to the courtroom-drama bit. And, along with the language, that's Primal Fear's biggest failing: this is a very linear book, almost videogame-like in its insistence that we have to solve problem A, fight the boss battle, and then go on to problem B. Even though it's an old cliché in itself that (unless you're Law and Order) the basic piece of mystery-flavored entertainment will have two threads of mystery going at once-- only to be wrapped up into one at the end, of course-- utilizing that particular cliché at least shows that the artist doing the creating is capable of juggling such things in such a way that it keeps you entertained. Diehl is either beyond that or simply not capable of it, given the linearity here. He's just not interested. He's relying on the big reveal to throw the reader off. And it does, somewhat, but the linear nature of the narrative makes him reach for stuff that comes naturally to authors who do it the other way (dramatic tension being the main example).
In any case, the short answer, though it's already far too late for that: eh, not awful. But the movie is much, much better. Not terribly often I get to say that. ***
Rated by buyers -
I read this book a few years back and could not get it out of my mind. The ending was just such a surprise. I read it and immediately had to rent the movie. The book was better, although I thought the movie was very good and true to the novel. Edward Norton played his character wonderfully.
This is my favorite all-time suspense novel.
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