← Back to home
Substantial
Substantial
Justice
A comic thriller. A love story. A novel about the trouble that follows when justice gets personal.
The story
Set in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Substantial Justice follows romantic leads through a story of love, murder, and the troubled idealists of the era. Their world includes a far-right militia and the early internet, against a vividly observed backdrop of San Francisco and a nation in cultural and political turmoil.
Part thriller, part love story, the novel finds wit, complicated characters, and unexpected connection amid vengeance, paranoia, and hopeless political causes.
Praise for
Substantial Justice
It’s not often that a well-plotted thriller abounds with incisive and amusing social history. In fact, I can’t think of one, or certainly none in the league of Daniel Ben-Horin’s Substantial Justice. If you were around in the late 70’s or early 80’s, particularly in San Francisco, rural Northern California, or New York City, the tonic shocks of recognition come thick and fast. If you weren’t, you’re in for a different sort of treat. Either way, the details are revealing and exact. Then there is the love story that frames the murder story, plus the weirdly contemporary far-right militia story and the early-internet subplot. Best of all, the romantic leads are witty and complicated and you’ll root for them just as you root for the pure-hearted pair in a Jane Austen novel. There it is—Raymond Chandler meets Jane Austen in post-Vietnam America. Excellent stuff.— William Finnegan (Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life)
Substantial Justice is a joy to read--who can resist a mix of intrigue, cannabis, and fraught romance? It’s a literary thriller with a wildly accurate sense of the era it depicts—and great lines uttered by great characters. A winner.— Joan Silber (Winner of the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Improvement)
"Ben-Horin's comic death rattle of the 60's unleashes a wondrous set of lost souls who ricochet around the Reagan era following their bliss but finding only each other--which leads to sex, murder, and hopeless political causes. As a view of America it is strangely hopeful."— Ron Shelton (Writer/Director of Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump)
Substantial Justice is a rewarding story of several conflicting campaigns of love, vengeance and paranoia played out against the straitened landscape of American cultural and political panic. Ben-Horin’s novel of suspense kept me flipping pages as if it were a news crawl of breaking headlines.— Gregory Maguire (Author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West)
Substantial Justice captures the spirit of San Francisco at the very dawn of the Internet age, long before the arrival of the tech bros, set in a time when personal computing was just starting to slip into the public consciousness. Daniel Ben-Horin has woven a fast-paced tale that offers authentic portraits of both the American Left and Right, exploring the roots of our current Trumpian dystopia.— John Markoff (Author of Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier)