‘89 Encores : On this last day of the year, and of the 1980s, the View staff pays a return visit to some of the people who made news in 1989. : A Point of Departure

If someone in Paul Mones’ line of work can have a “good” year, then Mones had a vintage one.

The only attorney in the country specializing in the defense of children who kill their parents, Mones finished a book about these children in November. To be published in hardcover next September, the book will be titled “When the Innocents Strike Back” or “Broken Silence,” he said.

In fact, the book has provided a point of departure for Mones since a profile was published in View last June. He already is at work on a second book, an account of a murder investigation. Mones plans to begin writing this true crime story next month, finishing the manuscript in the autumn. And he says he has a third book on the horizon.

Ideas that Mones sold to television also are beginning to make it to the screen. A TV movie about juveniles on death row began filming after Thanksgiving, he said.

In the meantime, the 37-year-old Mones, who works as a consultant with defense attorneys, says he took on eight new cases in the last half of 1989, including one that diverges from his specialty. It’s a Florida case involving “a grandmother type who hired a hit man to kill her son-in-law,” he explained.

Finally, as a result of the View story, Mones said he was invited to serve on an advisory panel helping the National Basketball Assn. develop public service announcements about child abuse. The messages about recognizing and preventing child abuse are for broadcast during NBA games this season, Mones said.