Outlaws

Gripping and entertaining, George V. Higgins delivers a compelling and uncomfortably realistic account of the way society and the law really function.   It’s been a decade since the turbulent 60s and policeman John Richards still has to deal with a handful of leftover student radicals who continue to terrorize the Boston streets. In an effort to convict them once and for all, he liaises with ambitious lawyer Terry Gleason. Matters culminate one crisp Sunday morning when the students decide to rob the Friary, a pub in downtown Boston well-established as a site of drug-trafficking. Seven civilians are left dead in what comes to be called the Friary massacre. The trial proves nightmarish and unpredictable, not unlike the decade it took Richards and Gleason to apprehend the culprits in the first place.   In a heart-stopping rendition of cops and robbers, Outlaws proves that in the Boston demimonde nothing is as it seems.