Boston Attorney Brady Coyne Finds Trouble in Rural New Hampshire

The twentieth (or twenty-first, depending on how your counting) Brady Coyne novel finds the Boston attorney much more settled than ever before. He has a new home, a live-in girlfriend, and a new dog named Henry. However, his serene existence is interrupted when he gets an early-morning phone call from a political fixer who's managing the Senate campaign of a woman named Ellen Stoddard. Ellen's mother is one of Brady's clients, and Ellen's husband, Albert, is one of Brady's occasional fishing buddies.

The senate campaign is coming into the home stretch and of late, Albert has been acting "weirdly." Now he's disappeared altogether and Ellen has no idea where he might be. Obviously, this could cause problems for the campaign. The campaign manager, Jimmy D'Ambrosio, wants Brady to discretely hire a private investigator to figure out where in the hell Albert is and what he's been up to, so that they can contain the damage, if necessary.

Brady hires a friend name Gordon Cahill who begins digging into the case. The investigation takes Cahill to a tiny town named Southwick in rural New Hampshire. Cahill calls Brady and requests a meeting so that Cahill can bring Brady up to date. Shortly thereafter, the State Police contact Brady to tell him that Cahill has been murdered.

Brady is bound by attorney-client privilege, and as much as he might want to, he can't reveal to the police who his client is or what he was working on. This leaves Brady to investigate the matter himself, and off he goes to Southwick. Every seasoned reader of crime fiction understands that when the protagonist takes off to one of these quiet, scenic, quaint, little rural towns, things will not remain quiet and quaint for very long. In short order, Brady will find himself in the middle of a perplexing mystery and in grave danger, and he will need all of his wits to extricate himself from the situation.

This is a very good entry in the series, and by now Brady Coyne is like an old friend. It's good to see him a bit more settled; one can only hope that he will remain so.