BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Even the Law Is Tainted in This World of Corruption : THE JUDGE by Steve Martini; Putnam’s $23.95, 400 pages

Nowadays, any novelist who writes a courtroom thriller faces a curious problem created by the pervasive coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial: We all know (or think we know) what really goes on in a courtroom, and the novelist who indulges himself in poetic license when it comes to legal procedure puts his credibility at risk.

So the highest praise I can bestow upon “The Judge,” the latest bestseller from Steve Martini, is to say that Martini gets it right.

In “The Judge,” Steve Martini has tweaked the customs and conventions of the courtroom thriller by casting a judge as the much-put-upon suspect. Armando Acosta, dubbed “the Coconut” by the attorneys who face his wrath in court, is one nasty jurist who takes pleasure in intimidating the defendants and the attorneys who appear before him. We are not intended to like him, and Martini makes sure that we don’t.

“He missed his calling,” we are told of Judge Acosta, “with the passing of the Spanish Inquisition.”

We soon discover that His Honor has a weakness for hookers, and he is arrested for soliciting an undercover cop disguised as a streetwalker in a sting operation. If that weren’t humiliating enough, Acosta’s accuser quickly ends up dead--and, of course, the judge himself is under suspicion.

The task of defending the odious Acosta falls to Paul Madriani, a criminal defense attorney whom we are plainly intended to admire--Madriani is a decent man who loathes the imperious Acosta but agrees to represent him on principle (and a $75,000 retainer). Still, if only to reassure us that Madriani is no wimp, we are shown that his fierce sense of justice sometimes threatens to boil over into an old-fashioned fistfight.

“You have an uncanny knack for chaos,” the judge observes of his defense lawyer.

Madriani, of course, is the ‘90s counterpart of the hard-boiled dick, which means that he has been draped in garb that would have looked ridiculous on Phillip Marlowe. He’s a sensitive guy who would never hit on a female colleague in the workplace, a single father who spends quality time with his kid when he is not busy defending accused criminals.

“My daughter is a lover, a hugger,” Madriani pauses to tell us, “one of those children who will for no stated reason come to me, silent and wistful, seeking a hug as other children might ask for candy.”

“The Judge” is crowded with good cops and bad cops, calculating prosecutors and cynical defense attorneys, all of them caught up in a vast interlocking vendetta that has something to do with a simmering scandal in the police union. Was Judge Acosta set up because he was a crusading judge with an eye on corruption in high places? Or was he merely a “bottom feeder” who was betrayed by his own sick passions?

“When was the last time you saw a crime of violence that made sense?” the judge himself asks, apparently less concerned than his own lawyer about the thickening fog of conspiracy that threatens to obliterate not only Madriani’s case but his life, too.

As Madriani drives his story toward the revelation of who done it, we are drawn ever deeper into a world in which corruption is pervasive and the law itself is tainted. And yet, true to form, Martini suggests that truth and justice will prevail. Indeed, he resorts to a tear-jerking plot device in which the deepest and darkest secret comes out of the mouth of a babe.

“The Judge” is mostly dialogue-driven, and big chunks of the book read like a motion-picture script. Even when Martini is narrating his story, the words are spoken in the first person by Madriani in the chatty confessional style that is obligatory in hard-boiled mystery fiction. But this, too, is part of the genre of the courtroom thriller: Can a movie deal be far from the mind of any crime novelist in the Grisham era?