Rule of Capture audiobook

Review:“The first class they taught them in law school was called Property. The first case they taught them in Property was about how you make the things in nature your property through kill or capture.”There was a big war, it was lost, whilst fresh out of law school in a law firm with the country broken, that was then, and now, Donald Kimoe has great test unlike any other before, a task at hand being..“Getting justice at secret trials for people the government wanted to disappear was not easy.”Whilst there is this status of the country:"Defeat meant the end of empire. Economic sanctions, scarcity where there had been abundance, more people fighting over the less that was left. The rich hoarded what they had won in the years before, hiding in gated communities and shell companies guarded by privatized police and smart lawyers. The more irrelevant the American flag became in a time of worldwide crisis, the more some people started to wave it, on the news and on the job, trying to conjure the return of a past that had never really been.The instability was compounded by deeper changes in the population, changes everyone had long known were coming, the same way they knew the heavy weather was coming, neither of which changes anyone could stop. The people who had the power saw that to keep it, they needed to use it to make sure those changes didn’t take it away. So they went to war on the future.”Christopher Brown, an author, also a lawyer who is successfully one of these, “Texans with good bullshit detectors and a strong sense of justice,” running parallel with his memorable protagonist, a fighter of injustices and undoing terrible histories or at least, “I’m fighting with them, right here, the only way I know how. One case at a time.”A needed tale with at its the core zealous advocacy, fiction writing with speculative realism in a dystopian America needing saving.This one a birth of imaginative writing from something like characters, thoughts, and worlds of The Firm, Better Call Saul, and 1984 combined.I like what he’s doing with his writings.The first book Tropic of Kansas was more adventure and thriller this one more slow burner, deeper and cerebral, a lawyer in conflict with the system all adding to this Tropic of Kanas world.You may learn to keep away from using White-Out and being recipient of a Mary Lou.A Military and martial law kaleidoscope with an articulate and intelligent tale with inception to the dystopian and the relevant world becoming undone before your eyes, set by step, law by law, with the land of residency under scrutiny, all penetrating the consciousness of the reader for further contemplation and serious concern of the world to come in the next episode of this world of Tropic of Kansas and never reality.In my interview with the author he said what follows about this work:Lou PendergrastYou have a novel out August 13, 2019, described by publisher Harper Voyager as the “first volume in an explosive legal thriller series set in the world of Tropic of Kansas.” So this is both the first volume and a follow-on from the previous book. What can readers expect to find in this new work of yours? Especially in terms of characters and setting.Christopher BrownMy new novel Rule of Capture is the story of a burnt out lawyer named Donny Kimoe who makes his living defending political dissidents in a USA drifting into totalitarianism. He represents alleged insurgents who have been hauled before a special emergency court created after martial law is declared in disaster-ridden parts of the Gulf Coast. His main client in the book is a young journalist named Xelina Rocafuerte who is accused of being a terrorist in an effort to silence her after she witnesses the assassination of an opposition leader.  When Donny screws up Xelina’s case because he’s distracted with another matter, and with his own personal problems, he has just days to fix the mess he’s made before she is sent to the secret prison camp from which no one returns. That means breaking the rules, exposing the conspiracy behind the regime in power, and risking the same fate as his clients.The book is set in the same world as Tropic of Kansas, and both Donny and Xelina first appeared in that book as secondary characters. But Rule of Capture takes place earlier in time, in a setting that feels closer to our contemporary reality, and yet even more different—an America that has been defeated in a war with China, ravaged by extreme weather, and subjected to international sanctions and austerity. Rule of Capture is a dystopian novel, but one that tries to make more room for humor—even if it’s gallows humor. The book I’m writing now for publication in 2020 as a follow-on to Rule of Capture tells the story of the same lawyer defending people in front of the tribunals of a post-revolutionary utopia. My idea is that you first have to go deep into the dark places to find your way to the light. “Utopia” by definition is a place that does not exist, but I’m trying to get as close as I can. And I think ecology—which thematically underpins all three books—is the key.Read the rest --> Interview with Christopher Brown On writing and his new novel Rule of CaptureExcerpts @ https://more2read.com/review/rule-of-capture-by-christopher-brown/ 

This was easily my favorite book I've read in the last year, if not two. I rarely enjoy legal dramas, but exploring the alternate timeline mirror world of our current slow motion societal collapse via the jaded lens of a burnt out criminal defense attorney was compelling, gripping, and frequently hilarious. If you've read TROPIC OF KANSAS, you have an idea of how the characters (and the world) will come out in the end, but that detracts nothing whatsoever from the thrill of the ride.

In dystopian fiction, some authors envision a future along the lines of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a nightmarish post-apocalyptic world in which a trickle of survivors struggle to survive. Others picture a time yet to come when a tyrannical state enslaves those unlucky enough to lie within its borders. The classic examples are Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. In Rule of Capture, Christopher Brown takes a different approach. He renders a disturbing portrait of dystopia in the making.War, climate change, and a tectonic shift to the RightIn fact, the novel portrays the United States in the not-too-distant future. Someone very much like a certain former occupant of the Oval Office was elected President. The country went to war to subdue movements for change throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Then, came a catastrophic war with China, which the US lost. The price the country paid was to cede its Pacific Island territories and the state of Hawaii to China.Meanwhile, the climate crisis has wreaked havoc on America’s heartland. Millions of refugees have been driven from the plains states southward into Texas, and much of the Gulf coast is now underwater. In Texas, where the novel is set, as well as Washington DC, Right-Wing politicians are moving quickly to suppress dissent. This is truly dystopia in the making.Christopher Brown aptly sums all this up: “the more the old order started to collapse as the climate degenerated, the economy cratered, and the geopolitical order inverted, the most the state worked to preemptively police unrest.” It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to foresee something like this in America’s future.“No real law, just raw power, dressed up in a tie”Houston attorney Donny Kimoe is a former federal prosecutor turned defense counsel. He scrapes by on the meager income he receives from indigent clients assigned to him by the court. Donny spends much of his time “on Monday mornings at the federal courthouse trying to help torture victims remember what happened to them in lockup over the weekend.” Justice is nowhere in sight, because it’s all “legal” under the martial law that’s now in force.“There is no real law,” a friend remarks. “Just raw power, dressed up in a tie. It’s always been that way. And it’s starting to get a whole lot worse.” However bitter, that statement is literally true, because a coup is underway. The President has lost the election but is pulling every lever in sight in an attempt to overturn the results and stay in power, not just for four years but possibly for forty. Therein lies the endgame of this dystopia in the making.A top-secret prison for “terrorists”Now the court has forced Donny to take on the case of Xelina Rocafuerte, a journalist who is documenting the growing protest movement. The government alleges that she is a terrorist who produces recruiting videos for the nonexistent Free Rovers Organization. The “terrorists” are no more than scattered scattered and disconnected bands of activists seeking to protest the Right-Wing takeover. And Xelina is a radical environmentalist and a legitimate journalist, nothing more. But she is threatened with removal of her citizenship and confinement in a top-secret black facility said to be even worse than the refugee camps scattered about the Texas countryside. In his increasingly frantic efforts to defend her, Donny digs deeply into the government’s bogus charges . . . and turns up shocking evidence of the corruption and collusion between the courts and the government. Where men call the shots, and the rule of law is empty, dystopia has truly arrived.The legal theory at the heart of this taleThe meaning of the novel’s title doesn’t become clear until well into the story, but it’s central to the author’s theme. In law, the “rule of capture” initially referred to “the way you make an animal your property is to mortally wound it in a net or a trap,” as Christopher Brown notes. It’s drawn from common law in England. But it “worked well for other things. Oil, gas, and water, for example. . . The same kind of theory was how the early American Supreme Court [in Johnson v. M’Intosh] was able to rule that the guy who bought his land from the U.S. government had superior title to the guy who bought the same land years earlier from the Indians who had lived there since before the Pilgrims. . . It was the law of the apex predator, the creature who takes what nature lets in.” Property rights as defined in the American legal system are grounded in this concept. And that concept is a bone of contention for the environmental activists Donny Kimoe defends in this novel.About the authorAs the entry in Wikipedia notes, Christopher Brown‘s “first novel, Tropic of Kansas, was published in 2017 and was a finalist for the 2018 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the year. His work frequently focuses on issues at the nexus of technology, politics, economics and ecology. His short fiction and criticism has been published in a variety of anthologies and magazines, including MIT Technology Review’s Twelve Tomorrows, LitHub, Tor.com, Reckoning, and The Baffler.” Brown also practices law in Texas, as any reader is likely to surmise from reading Rule of Capture.

This one was on my to-read-list for quite a while. I knew I wanted to read it but did not know if this would be a story for me. I was pleasantly surprised. This is a very unique blend of dystopian eco-fiction. It might not seem like it in the beginning, but the story is as much about ecology as it is about law and I loved it!

This is a sequel to Tropic of Kansas, a political thriller about a near-future where things are rotten. This one ramps up the stakes high, with a fractured America under a lawless regime, which sounds like a headline I just read on HuffPost, but the author uses modern politics as a starting point, not as a wink and a nod. Christopher Brown digs deep into the conspiracy-thriller genre here, starring a lawyer who defends enemies of the state. It's good stuff, with incisive comments on politics and government and society. It's well worth a look. Grab Tropic of Kansas and binge-read them together.

If John Brunner and William Gibson, with a dash of Rudy Rucker, were to collaborate on a book, this frightening wake up call might be the result.

4.5, actually. Beautifully written, intelligent, and something completely new.

Recent Reads: Rule Of Capture. Christopher Brown's dystopic legal thriller explores a Houston in the throes of climate collapse and with an authoritarian government about to clamp down. Lawyer Donny Kimoe must tread carefully to save a client. But he can't, he wants justice.

This near-future science fiction legal thriller is almost distressingly on the nose and has a creepingly prescient feel about it, especially given real ongoing trends in the uses of legal mechanisms to enable and enforce increasingly dystopian ideologies and protect and advance corporate interests while disempowering individuals and communities so that they have no recourse while suffering the disastrous effects. In a near-future USA filled with climate refugees and predatory capitalists looking for profits, a grubby and downtrodden and slightly tarnished public defender is handed the case of a young woman arrested as a revolutionary. The odds and the rules and the entire game are stacked against him, and her, and everyone like them, but he doggedly pursues some sort of justice for his client, despite everyone he knows pushing back against him, so pretty much your basic legal thriller formula, except with a potent speculative dimension.The process whereby civil rights are stripped away, ignored and overthrown is so crushingly banal and true-to-life and the vision of an environmentally and morally toxic US is so plausible that it's a good thing the book is fast-paced, readable and has a flawed but endearing protagonist or the book would be unbearable. It engages so effectively with the rigged game of power and money that enables the pursuit of profits while causing global catastrophe that it's mildly nauseating, but does so in a way that shows up how hollow Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock really was, and even arguably presents a grim view of the struggle, and the human costs, involved in overcoming entrenched interests and the overwhelming influence of money, that Kim Stanley Robinson glossed over in Ministry Of The Future. BUT it is an entertaining read, and I say that as someone who gave up on legal thrillers after two or three John Grisham novels turned me off the genre completely. In a real sense, this is a book about where the rubber meets the road in terms of the obstacles to change and reform, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't want to be hopeless, this version of optimism feels both highly qualified and earned and revolutionary in a way that the optimism in Termination Shock was essentially a function of wealth and privelege.

"If we want to build a better future, we need to build it on law.”“If we want to build a better future, we need to take it.” - Christopher Brown, Rule of CaptureIt is the near future in an America, that is almost, but not entirely like our America. Things are going south and personal freedoms are being eroded away--all in the name of security and the good of the country. Check out my twitter thread detailing the world building in Rule of Capture: https://twitter.com/M_A_Frasca/status...The tension between 'build it on law' and 'take it' forms the center of the plot. Public defender Donny Kimoe is torn by that tension as he represents an unjustly accused reporter. As he desperately pulls on threads, the curtain unravels and he uncovers more than he bargained for.This novel hits close to home (If this goes on...) and is a highly recommended read.A few notes:- You don't have to have read Tropic of Kansas first. In fact, given the world building, I would suggest reading Rule of Capture first.- If you are looking for a screed specifically against the Republican Party and/or Trump, you will be disappointed. The politicians and parties are unnamed and unidentifiable. And this is as it should be. What's important in the story is the way liberties and freedoms can slide away...and most people would be fine with that as long as they feel a little safer. Until it is too late.- The novel is filled with many easter eggs. For instance "The Mayor Donald Barthelme Memorial Turnpike." Look it up. It's a hoot.Pairs well with Naomi Klein's book about disaster capitalism, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and Robert Towne's movie script Chinatown.

Dystopian Law - Trial by HistoryA well crafted legal thriller, taking place in future Texas, with an oppressed wiseass lawyer, a tough talking freelance journalist with a big secret, and a cast of Machiavellian autocrats out to protect the state.Brown never wavers in his commitment to the story. As the plot descends into a labyrinthine, Chinatown-seque territory, we are shown a great deal of detail on the legal process. It's a fascinating documentarian approach that caters to a reader who likes to think. A sharp right turn of a plot twist at the end completely solidifies the realism of the tale and helps underpin how corrupt the system is.Initially, I was thinking of comparing this to Grisham. While I chard those novels up in my early twenties, they now feel like a simpler precursor to this tale. The thrills are matched by the foundations of a devastatingly real glimpse of what could be. Without revealing too much, my favourite invention was the passport app. All up, I greatly enjoyed this further foray into Brown's world, which started in companion piece, Tropic of Kansas. I would recommend starting there if you haven't already read it as it greatly enhances this novel.

This is the first in a new series (Dystopian Lawyer) set in the same world as Tropic of Kansas (which you do not have to read first-this is fine as a standalone). Donny Kimoe is a lawyer defending political dissidents in secret courts where the rules are rigged in favor of the government-these defendants basically have no chance at all. If found guilty, they can be sent to black interrogation camps, imprisoned for indeterminate time periods or even executed. The American government spies on its citizens constantly and is on its way to becoming completely totalitarian. The land is suffering from climate change and America’s own citizens are immigrants to different areas of the country. This is an utterly fascinating and scary world, fully developed and very complex. The law that Donny argues is pieces of our existing law and he tries to use it to get around the government destruction of the rule of law. The courts and story reminded me of our immigration courts today and also how the government could start treating citizens by simply declaring us terrorists. Great book!! I am thrilled that this is going to be a series and I am eagerly awaiting the second entry in the world of the Dystopian Lawyer! Highly recommend, definite top book of the year!!

A legal thriller set in a near-future dystopia. This is an engaging read that leaves you with lots of real-world philosophy to consider.

This was really hard to put down. Think of it like better call saul meets william gibson.Well plotted, occasionally drifts into clich or jargon. A weird book I'm glad exists.