If a lawyer with the unseemly name of “Christian Leonard Hooker” were practicing in Illinois, you'd have to report him to the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission.

Among his minor transgressions were teaching shoplifting skills to his nine-year-old twin children in Chicago and parking in a spot reserved for the disabled outside a hotel in St. Louis.

The worst were his semi-ethical, pro bono representation in Australia of a lover in a sexual harassment case, and another affair that ended when the woman was murdered by her husband.

Hooker is the protagonist in a fictional work, “Houseboating in the Ozarks,” by a real lawyer – Gary D. Forrester of Phebus & Koester, Urbana – that chronicles a nine-day journey through the Midwest.

Forrester follows Hooker on an odyssey of car crashes, hurricane-force winds, suicide attempts, a pair of mating kangaroos, and “endless existential musings that commingle the sacred with the profane.”

A 57-year-old central Illinois attorney, Chris Hooker and various family members wander through Chicago, Cahokia, Branson, Independence, St. Louis, Elsah, Hannibal, Quincy, again to Chicago, and then back home.

Vivid characters in the book include a Sioux named Cheeto High Bear, a Lakota named Brenda Which Woman, an Australian hitchhiker with a gun, the Aboriginal lover Yolanda, an aging mother with Alzheimer's, and a passel of kids and kin with idiosyncrasies.

The book was released this month by Dufour Editions in Pennsylvania, simultaneously with a compact disc of the author's original songs recorded by Rank Strangers, his Australian bluegrass band.

A 1975 graduate of the University of Illinois College of Law, Gary Forrester has a master's degree in English literature from Eastern Illinois University. His thesis was on Beowulf and Chaucer.

Forrester's vitae suggests that many of the places and characters cited in “Houseboating in the Ozarks” may have been drawn from personal, but purely coincidental, experiences.

After two years as a law clerk to federal Judge Henry S. Wise, he taught contracts and torts at Melbourne University Law School in Australia from 1976 to 1980, and was elected secretary of the university assembly.

For the next two years, he was managing attorney for Dakota Plains Legal Services on the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

From 1983 to 1985, he was an adjunct professor at the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore, and director of legal services for the city's Native American Program.

Forrester returned to Australia in 1986 to practice law for 14 years and assist the government of Victoria in establishment of a legal framework for workers' compensation reform. He also managed an organic farm for seven years with assistance from an international organization.

Since 2000, he has practice in Champaign and Urbana and taught legal ethics, civil procedure, oral argument and indigenous law at the University of Illinois College of Law.

Forrester has written articles for the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association Trial Journal and chapters for the Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education, and he has been state editor of the ABA Survey of State Class Action Law since 2002.

He is the author of the Digest of American Indian Law (Rothmans Press 1990) and articles on “Aboriginal Land Rights” and “U.S. Indian Legal Services” for Australian publications.

Forrester says “Houseboating in the Ozarks” has been available on the Amazon Web site at a 30 percent discounted pre-publication price. For more information, visit www.garyforrester.com.