If you’re in the market for a thriller of biblical proportions, make Firstborn your first choice. A fledgling lawyer gets on a jury and becomes instrumental in convicting a man of a heinous murder. The accused is a redneck, retarded mess. Fifteen years later, evidence comes to light that frees him. Our fledgling lawyer, now an experienced and celebrated defense attorney, is the legal tool that opens the jail door. The idiot who went to prison has transformed himself into a sleek intellectual. Once someone diagnosed his dyslexia, he learned how to compensate and developed himself into a physical and mental model of the model prisoner. However–you guessed it–his evil essence, the ugly drive to hurt and kill, has remained constant. He wants his revenge, and his methods are as ingenious as they are brutal and bloody. Firstborn is not a whodunit. You know all the time whodunit and who’s doing it, and who’s going to do it. It’s No Mercy Percy. The mystery is who and how to stop him before all the good guys get slaughtered.
Those are the bare bones of the matter. However, Stewart has given us another dimension. The clue to that dimension–a biblical and religious one–lies in the title itself. If you can’t guess it now, you will know it intimately by the time you finish this story of love and murder and salvation in San Antonio. It’s well worth the journey.
