Review: The Wilding Probate, by DJ Butler

D.J. Butler wears a lot of hats, and I’m not just talking about his sick tricorn, or his badger pelt; when he’s not writing his own richly-detailed books, he’s an acquisitions editor for Baen, and he does some legal work in between.

Drawing on his knowledge as an attorney, he decides to delve into the young adult market with THE WILDING PROBATE, starring sixteen year-old Rebecca “Bucky” McCrae, a paralegal in her dad’s small-town firm. When the town’s rich resident dies, family and foes come out of the woodwork to get their claws into his will…but not all for the reasons you might expect.

While the YA market gets a (well-deserved) rap for being full of terrible cat-mom fantasies, Butler is the rare writer who keeps things grounded while still giving us an exceptional protagonist in a pulse-pounding thriller.

The story

Bucky and her dad live in the Pacific Northwest town of Howard, within a respectable driving distance of both Yakima and Boise. It rains. People drive trucks and wear plaid. Most everyone is broke, or broke-adjacent. Bucky keeps her nose to the grindstone at school, and when she’s out of school, she’s a paralegal for her father’s low-budget law office.

There is one decently wealthy family in town, the Wildings, and the family patriarch dies shortly before the book begins. Suddenly there are shady happenings afoot in Howard, including well-armed newcomers with some seriously dangerous skills, and everyone seems to want a piece of the complicated Wilding will. Land, money, power, all of it is on the table.

There’s a copy of it in Bucky’s dad’s office. When she swings by the place one night to check it, she stumbles across a local deputy murdering a vagrant…and the office has been robbed. Bucky accidentally contaminates the evidence, hurtling herself headfirst into the middle of the conflict.

And it’s gonna take a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to climb out. That’s just the start.

The characters

Bucky is our first-person protagonist, a girl who works hard and keeps her head on straight. She loves her dad, and even more important, she’s able to be honest with everyone around her. This comes into play with her not-boyfriend, “Evil” Patton (his parents named him after Evel Knevel, but couldn’t spell it correctly). Evil is quite smitten with Bucky, who doesn’t reciprocate, and she has enough mature foresight to tell him he only likes her because she’s the only girl in town.

While Evil is somewhat your average teenage boy, carrying Sahara Desert levels of thirst for Bucky, he’s also a competent small-town hunter, woodsman, and manual laborer. He’s with Bucky when she gets entangled in the Wilding will debacle, and whether out of friendship or horny-on-main ambition, he sticks by her side through the whole thing.

The rest of the cast is varied enough that you can tell them apart, and realistic enough that if you’ve ever spent time in an off-the-major-highway place, these people feel familiar to you. YA tends to be a graveyard where shallow, half-developed characters go to die, but Butler took the time to put a little heart and soul into Howard’s residents, and it comes across very well in the story.

The world

Ours, just a little more out of the way. No speculative elements to speak of.

The politics

None.

Content warning

Lanuage, up to the S-bomb, and some sexual talk, but not for the sake of flagrant flaunting. In one scene, for example, Evil whips out a condom while he and Bucky are on the run, but it’s actually something he keeps handy as part of his survival training. He explains why, and it makes perfect sense. He’s just also a teenage boy, so he makes a couple of jokes.

The story also carries some darker implications of rape and human trafficking, so it doesn’t shy away from the harder edges of the criminal element. And there is plenty of gunplay.

Who is it for?

People who remember liking YA books back before they became cultural puppets for the woke agenda, and/or people who like legal thrillers with a little bit of rugged survivalism mixed in. Bear Grylls meets the Lincoln Lawyer, as a teen girl.

Why read it?

It is entertaining, smart, and just gritty enough to be serious. I laughed at the right parts, gasped aloud in others, and smirked a little at some of the inside jokes (like when Bucky stumbles across a treasure trove of sci-novels like Dune and Empire of Silence.)

Butler isn’t the first person to come from an adult spec-fic background and try his hand at a teen legal thriller. But to date, he’s the only one to really pull it off. (Looking at you, John Grisham.) Go read this book. It’s just dang good.