A Bad Lawyer Takes a Very Unusual Case

This is not your usual legal thriller and Sid Kaplan is definitely not your usual legal thriller lawyer/protagonist. Sid--and the story he inhabits--are far removed from the cases and legal beagles created by authors like John Grisham, Scott Turow, John Lescroart and Michael Connelly.

Sid was once riding high as a prominent New York defense attorney, but then he crashed and burned in the wake of too much booze and coke. He's now cleaned up his act and is attempting to claw his way back, but his one-man practice is pitiful in the extreme. Then, however, a woman named Thelma Barrow begs Sid to take the case of her daughter, Priscilla, a white woman who is accused of murdering her drug-dealing black husband. Thelma can't afford to pay much, but Sid realizes that the publicity generated by a high-profile trial could put him back on the fast track to fame and fortune.

Sid agrees to meet with Priscilla who's in jail on Riker's Island and it's immediately clear that Priscilla, a tough, street-wise and very sexy babe, is going to be nothing but trouble. She admits to shooting her husband but is claiming self-defense. Actually, Sid couldn't care less whether she was justified or not in pulling the trigger, and as the evidence against his client accumulates, Sid carefully schools Priscilla in how the killing might have gone down in a way that will square her claim of self-defense with the evidence that is piling up against her.

Sid is assisted in the defense by his two closest friends, Caleb Talbot, who serves as his investigator, and Julie Gills, who works as his office manager. All three are badly wounded souls, but they form a bond so tight that they not only work together, they all live together.

To say much more would spoil the twists and turns of a tough, gritty and very surprising story. It doubtless goes without saying that things are not always what they seem and that in taking Priscilla's case, Sid Kaplan may get a lot more than he bargained for. This is a well-written book with interesting and quirky characters that are fully drawn. It should appeal to a wide range of readers who enjoy crime fiction.        

The Two Minute Rule

Robert Crais is best known for his series featuring L.A. private-eye Elvis Cole and Cole's partner, the inscrutable Joe Pike. But while I like those books, this stand-alone, originally published in 2006, remains my favorite of Crais's novels.

Two thugs named Marchenko and Parsons are stricly amateur, if brutal, bank robbers. They do not know the Two Minute Rule, which holds that a robber only has a two minute window to be in and out of a bank before the law is almost certainly going to be on the scene. The two get lucky long enough to score almost $17 million in a string of robberies, but their luck runs out when they walk out of their last bank into a hail of police bullets.

Max Holman is, or was, a professional bank robber who knew and scrupulously observed the Two Minute Rule. But in a moment of weakness, he broke the rule and was arrested in the middle of a robbery by a team led by FBI agent, Katherine Pollard. Ten years down the road, Max is finally being released from prison and his dream is to be reconciled with his son, Richie, who in rejecting his father has gone all the way in the other direction to become an L.A. cop.

Just as Max is being processed out, though, he receives the worst possible news imaginable: Richie has been murdered, along with three other police officers. The detectives investigating the killings quickly pin the crime on a gangbanger who then conveniently commits suicide, closing the case--at least as far as the cops are concerned.

A devastated Max, thinks the whole package is all too neat. His cursory inspection of the murder site convinces him that the killings could not have occurred as the police have theorized and he is determined to find the truth. For help, he turns to Katherine Pollard, the agent who arrested him. Pollard has left the Bureau and is now a widow with two small children. Reluctantly, she agrees to assist Max and it quickly becomes apparent that their efforts to discover what really happened the night of the murders is stirring up the proverbial hornets' nest. The cops and the Feebs insist that Max and Pollard step down and accept the police version of the crime. When the two refuse to do so, they suddenly find themselves in very grave danger with no apparent way out.

This is a book with well-developed characters and a fast-paced plot that seems perfectly believable. Readers who have enjoyed Crais's Cole/Pike books will certainly want to look for this one.(

Another Gem from George Pelecanos

This is another excellent novel from George Pelecanos who demonstrates once again that he knows the seamier side of Washington, D.C. inside and out and can portray it better than anyone else. Even better are the characters who populate this novel--some good, some bad, some still making up their minds, but virtually all of them struggling in one way or another.

The main protagonist, Lorenzo Brown, once ran with a rough gang headed by his best boyhood friend. But after serving eight years in prison on a drug charge, Lorenzo is back on the street, determined to stay on the straight and narrow and make a new life for himself. He finds a job as a "dog man," working for the Humane Society, attempting to rescue mistreated dogs.

Lorenzo must report periodically to his parole officer, an attractive but troubled woman named Rachel Lopez. By day, Rachel is very conscientious and does her job well. But by night, she drinks too much and picks up strangers in hotel bars for rough sex. Outside of their scheduled sessions, Lorenzo and Rachel also occasionally run into each other at a mid-day meeting of a Narcotics Anonymous chapter.

Lorenzo is doing well, content in his humble job and steering clear of his former bad associates, when a simple mistake by a stupid gang banger threatens to set off a conflict between two of D.C.'s major drug lords, one of whom is still Lorenzo's friend. The incident threatens both Lorenzo and Rachel and forces Lorenzo to make an agonizing choice.

These characters are beautifully drawn and their story pulls you in from the first page. These are real people in a setting that is totally believable and flawed or not, you can't help but sympathize with virtually all of them. Certainly you won't soon forget them.

Parker with a Getaway Face

This is the second book in Richard Stark's series about the amoral criminal, Parker. At the end of the first, The Hunter, Parker is on the run from the organized crime syndicate, the Outfit. At the opening of this book, he has made his way to Nebraska, where he successfully undergoes surgery to change his face to such an extent that even his old associates don't recognize him.

At the conclusion of the operation, Parker returns to the East, desperately in need of a score. An old acquaintance proposes an armored car heist, but Parker is extremely leary of the job. He's not all that confident in the old acquaintance and he likes even less the fact that the job is the bright idea of a waitress that the old acquaintance is living with. Parker's even more discouraged once he meets the woman in question, but he really needs the money and so agrees to the plan. He brings in another old friend, one in whom he has complete confidence, and redesigns the plan in the hope that he can get away with the loot before everything turns to crap.

As readers of this series will well know, that's never going to happen. Complications arise at nearly every turn and, as always, much of the fun in reading these books is watching the way in which Parker deals with one crisis after another. At this point, Stark, a pseudonym for Donald Westlake, was just beginning to hit his stride with this character. Happily, the series would run for a good number of years and nearly twenty-five books. This one, though, contains perhaps the best description of Parker, who "looked like a man who'd made money, but who'd made it without sitting behind a desk."

This book will appeal to any fan of crime fiction who likes his or her books lean, mean and captivating.(

A (True?) Confession

In The Appeal, John Grisham took on the important issue of electing state judges and allowing them to collect huge campaign contributions from people and institutions who might have business before the courts to which they are elected. Now, in The Confession, he takes on an even more important issue in the death penalty.

Keith Schroeder, a Lutheran minister in Kansas, is working in his study one morning when Travis Boyette, a career criminal currently out on parole and residing in a local half-way house, asks to see him. Boyette had attended services at Schroeder's church the previous Sunday and had been impressed by the minister's sermon on forgiveness. Boyette claims to be suffering from a terminal illness and has something that he'd like to get off his chest before he shuffles off into that long good night. He's decided that Keith is the man to hear his confession.

Boyette claims that nine years earlier, he had kidnapped, raped and murdered Nicole Yarber, a popular high school cheerleader in the small town of Sloan, Texas. He left Texas shortly thereafter and then was arrested, convicted and imprisoned for a subsequent crime. In the meantime, officials in Sloan arrested a young black man, Donte Drumm, a classmate of Nicole's, who confessed to the murder that Boyette claims to have committed. Complicating matters is that fact that Nicole's body was never recovered.

Donte Drumm quickly repudiated his confession, claiming that it had been coerced. He was defended by a bulldog of an attorney, Robbie Flak. But in spite of all of Flak's efforts and in spite of the fact that there was no body and no proof that Nicole was even dead, a judge and jury convicted Drumm of the killing on the basis of his confession and sentenced him to death. For the last nine years, Flak has done everything possible to delay the execution, but all of Donte's appeals have been exhausted and he is scheduled to die within days.

After his confession to Keith Schroeder, Boyette suggests that he might be willing to go to Texas and tell his story in the hope of saving Donte. But then again, maybe he wouldn't. He vacillates back and forth while the minister attempts to determine whether Boyette is telling the truth or if he is just another one of the nutcases or publicity seekers who turn up on such occasions looking for their fifteen minutes in the limelight.

The story takes off from that point as the clock rapidly ticks down toward Donte Drumm's execution, and as the story progresses, the reader gets a vivid look at the death penalty and the machinery by which it operates, especially in the state of Texas, which executes far more people than any other state in the Union. Irrespective of how one might feel about the issue, this book is bound to provoke some soul-searching on the matter.

In truth, while this is a very good book, it does lag at some points. Grisham obviously feels strongly about this issue and he sometimes overloads the reader with a bit too much detail and slows the momentum of the story. Some of the characters are also a bit one-dimensional in service of the argument that Grisham wants to make. Still it's a compelling story and once it grabs your attention, you're likely to keep reading well into the day or night in order to see the conclusion.

It Was a Dark and (Very) Stormy Night...

The first of Elmore Leonard's famous ten rules for writing is, "Never open a book with weather." In Winter Prey, the fifth book in John Sandford's excellent Prey series, the author ignores the rule and opens the book with a blistering winter storm. Indeed, the severe weather that permeates the novel virtually becomes a character in and of itself, to the point that the reader might well want to be sitting in front of a blazing fire with a snifter of fine Brandy close at hand. T...moreThe first of Elmore Leonard's famous ten rules for writing is, "Never open a book with weather." In Winter Prey, the fifth book in John Sandford's excellent Prey series, the author ignores the rule and opens the book with a blistering winter storm. Indeed, the severe weather that permeates the novel virtually becomes a character in and of itself, to the point that the reader might well want to be sitting in front of a blazing fire with a snifter of fine Brandy close at hand. The book finds Sandford's protagonist, Lucas Davenport, separated from the Minneapolis PD and virtually hiding out in his Wisconsin cabin. Then a family is brutally murdered and their house is torched in a neighboring county. The small town sheriff knows that he is in way over his head and appeals to Davenport for help. Lucas is growing restless and agrees to take the lead in the investigation after he is sworn in as a deputy. From the opening scene, the book takes off like a shot. The antagonist, "The Iceman," has a secret that he is determined to keep, no matter how many bodies might fall in the process and regardless of how many innocent people may be hurt. And the bodies do keep falling as the Iceman becomes increasingly desperate. Davenport is initially stumped and what precious little evidence there is points him in a puzzling direction. Happily, though, in the course of the investigation, Lucas meets a local doctor, Weather Karkinnen. "Is that Weather, like 'Stormy Weather'?" Lucas asks. "'Exactly,' the doctor said." Little does Lucas know... As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that there are a number of nasty characters in addition to the Iceman in this small town and some pretty nasty secrets as well. Lucas will naturally do his best to sort it out, but it turns out that this tiny town may hold more of a threat to Davenport than any he ever faced in the Big City. This is another very compelling entry in this series, compete with the plot twists, engaging characters and black humor that Sandford's fans have come to expect. A great read for any cold winter night, but keep the Brandy close at hand; it's very cold out there.

Stories from the Grand Master

This book contains seventy-one short stories written by Lawrence Block--virtually all of the stories he had written through 1999, when the book appeared. The principal exception would be some of the Keller stories which had just been published in Hit Man.

There are several Matthew Scudder stories in the volume, all of which appear with other stories in The Night and The Music, which was released in 2011. The volume also includes a few stories featuring Chip Harrison, Bernie Rhodenbarr and Martin Ehrengraf, the dapper defense attorney whose clients are always innocent, simply by virtue of the fact that they are represented by Ehrengraf. Evan Tanner, Block's other series character apparently had not appeared in any short stories by the time this collection was published.

The bulk of the collection, though, consists of stories that do not feature any of Block's familiar characters and, like the others, they are uniformly entertaining. I particularly enjoyed "Like a Bone in the Throat," in which a man testifies against the killer who murdered his sister but then begins a correspondence with him once the killer has gone to prison. In "The Tulsa Experience," two brothers take a vacation to Oklahoma, which turns out to be more exciting than one might expect of the average Oklahoma vacation. "Like a Bug on a Windshield" will make anyone think twice before flipping off an obnoxious truck driver again.

Another of my favorites is "Three in the Side Pocket," in which a man walks into a bar and meets an attractive woman. Interesting and unexpected things follow. The same is true of virtually all of the characters and situations that Block has created in these stories. They originally appeared in a variety of places through the years and most are virtually impossible to find in the original sources. It's great to have them collected in this large volume and any fan of Lawrence Block will want to have this book in his or her collection.(

Introducing Jack Reacher

This is the book that introduced Lee Child's popular character, Jack Reacher in 1997. Reacher is a former military cop who's been made redundant by the end of the cold war. After spending his entire life in the military (Reacher grew up in a military family), he's now completely on his own, footloose and fancy-free. After spending much of his life abroad, he's wandering about the country, getting to know the U.S. up close and personal. As will continue to be the case, Reacher travels light, with nothing more than the clothes on his back, paying cash, traveling by bus and staying off the grid.

On a whim, Reacher has a bus driver drop him off at the interchange for tiny Margrave, Georgia. Reacher has heard a story about an ancient Blues man who once spent time in the town and decides to check it out. He walks fourteen miles into town, orders a cup of coffee in a diner, and is promptly arrested for murder.

Reacher knows that he hasn't killed anyone, at least not in Margrave and not for some time, so he's obviously mystified. He soon discovers that there are a lot of weird things going on in this tiny, pristine town where the townfolk, or at least a good number of them, are harboring some strange secrets. Reacher couldn't care less. He just wants to get clear of the murder charges, get back on the bus, and resume his wandering life. But he quickly develops a personal stake in the murder case, which is decidedly bad news for the evildoers.

Before long, the bodies are piling up left and right, and Reacher is contributing more than his fair share to the carnage. This is a cleverly-plotted book, although it does depend on a coincidence that's almost too huge to swallow. Still, it's a fun read that sets the template for the future books in the series. This is essentially "Shane" brought forward into the Twentieth (and now the Twenty-first) century. Jack Reacher is the mysterious stranger with something approaching mystical powers, who rides into a troubled town, albeit on a Greyhound rather than a horse. He cleans up the town, disposes of the bad guys, dallies briefly with a beautiful, sexy woman that he will have to abandon in the end, and then, once his job is done, he rides off into the sunset.

What's not to like? The formula has worked very well through sixteen books now, and Jack Reacher has become an international favorite. Those who have somehow missed him would do well to start with Killing Floor.

Parker in a Vise

This is the fourteenth entry in Richard Stark's excellent series about Parker, the amoral criminal whose carefully-laid plans almost always come undone because of some unforeseen accident or because of an act of carelessness by one of the other crooks involved in the plan. In this case, it's the getaway driver who screws everything up. This is not the driver that Parker would have prefered, but it's the driver that Parker had to settle for. And it's Parker who will now have to pay the price.

Parker and two accomplices hit an armored car for $70,000. (This is back in 1969, when $70,000 was still a lot of money.) The overconfident driver loses control of the getaway car and rolls it only a couple of blocks from the scene of the crime. With the cops hot on his tail, Parker grabs the loot and escapes into an amusement park across the street that is closed for the winter.

Parker fully expects an army of cops to surround the park and flush him out, but then several hours pass and nothing happens. It turns out that the two patrolmen who saw Parker go over the fence are corrupt cops in league with local mobsters. Rather than bringing Parker to justice, they intend to hunt him down, kill him and keep the cash for themselves. The result is a great cat-and-mouse chase in which Parker, out-manned and out-gunned, must use every trick in the bag to save himself. He's even more inventive and resourceful than usual, and Stark (Donald Westlake) produces a taut, gripping story with a great climax. Fans of this series will be very grateful to the University of Chicago Press for resurrecting this title which has been unavailable for a good number of years.

Charlie Hood Drives Again

Charlie Hood, a veteran of the Iraq War, is a modern-day lawman with the soul of a 19th century western sheriff. Charlie is a deputy in the L.A. Sheriff's Department, and he cruises the Antelope Valley in the desert north of the city. Charlie loves to drive, preferably alone, and preferably late at night.

One night however, Charlie is paired with another deputy, Terry Laws, known to the rest of the department as "Mr. Wonderful," because of the great job he's done raising his daughters, because of his dedication to the job, the bodybuilding titles he's won, and the charitable work he does in his off-duty hours. Hood and Laws respond to a routine Housing Authority complaint and as they are returning to the patrol car, a gunman appears from behind a tree and murders Laws in a hail of bullets. Hood survives, perhaps because the gun jammed or perhaps the gunman deliberately spared him.

Shortly thereafter, Hood receives a visit from Internal Affairs. The IA people suggest that perhaps "Mr. Wonderful" wasn't so wonderful at all and they want to add Hood to the team and have him investigate Laws. Hood is reluctant; he wants to patrol the county and catch bad guys. He has no taste for investigating fellow cops. But IA offers the usual rejoinder: somebody's got to police the police and, sadly, not all of the bad guys are civilians.

Hood begins his investigation and soon discovers that Laws had an awful lot of money for someone earning a deputy's wages. As he probes deeper into the situation, Charlie is drawn into a sordid world of drugs, money laundering and other illegal activities. But Hood is resolute; he has a strong moral compass, and he will pursue this mess to its conclusion, no matter how distasteful or violent.

This is the second of Parker's books to feature Charlie Hood, and as is always the case in Parker's books, the characters are unique, interesting and sharply drawn. The investigation is intriguing and the climax suitably violent and hair-raising. Parker has written a third book in the Charlie Hood series, Iron River, and one hopes that he will write a lot more.        

Brady Coyne's 24th Case

"Hell Bent" is the twenty-fourth book to feature Boston attorney Brady Coyne, and it ranks among the best of the entries. For those who haven't met him, Coyne is a sole practitioner with a client list that consists mostly of fairly well-heeled Bostonians and a secretary named Julie, who keeps his professional life in some semblance of order. He's long divorced and usually involved with an attractive female.

As Brady comments in this book, he was trained to be a lawyer, but his DNA programmed him to be a fisherman. In this book, though, unlike most of the others, Brady has no time for fishing. After an absence of several years, an old girlfriend, Alex Shaw, walks back into Brady's life and asks him to represent her brother, Gus. Gus is a photojournalist who lost a hand, and thus his profession, in an explosion in Iraq. Not surprisingly he comes back a changed man and the changes are not for the better.

Gus is suffering from PTSD; he's a stranger to his wife and daughters, and a menace to them and to himself as well. His wife sues for divorce and secures a restraining order against him, but Gus doesn't care. He's perfectly willing to give her everything; nothing matters to him any more. Alex wants Brady to protect Gus's interests in the divorce, and Gus reluctantly agrees to let Brady represent him.

Almost immediately thereafter, though, Gus is found shot to death, the victim of an apparent suicide. The cops and everyone else sign off on the case, but Alex refuses to believe that her brother would kill himself. Brady isn't sure, but Alex has walked back into his life four months after his latest girlfriend walked out of it. There's still a spark between Alex and Brady and so he agrees to investigate.

Inevitably, things are more complicated than they initially appear, and Brady finds himself drawn into a complex and dangerous situation. The result is a book in which the urgency mounts and which is increasingly difficult to put down. Long-time fans of the series will enjoy "Hell Bent", but it will also appeal to fans of crime fiction who have never sampled Tapply's work before.

CSI Vermont

This is the twenty-first entry into one of the longest running--and best--regional mystery series out there. Beginning with Open Season in 1988, Archer Mayor has created a memorable cast of characters, headed by the series protagonist, Joe Gunther.

When the series began, Joe was a detective with the Brattleboro, Vermont P.D. Twenty-three years later, he is head of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, a state agency that investigates major crimes anywhere within the state. He has taken with him into the VBI a number of the investigators who worked with him in Brattleboro, and readers who have been with this series from the beginning have watched most of these characters grow from young adulthood into something approaching middle age. How close they are to middle age is a bit unclear. Mayor has allowed them to age, but has not tied them strictly to the actual calendar. This is a good thing, because when the series opened, Gunther had already been widowed for eighteen years after being married for eight, which would put him somewhere in his middle seventies by the time he was forced to investigate the crimes in this new book. No wonder the poor guy is tired!

Early in Red Herring, Gunther and his team are confronted with three confusing incidents. One is clearly a murder; another is an apparent suicide, and the third appears to be a drunk-driving accident. Gunther's investigation soon reveals, however, that all three incidents are clearly murder, almost certainly committed by the same serial killer who has left a calling card at each scene--a large drop of blood that obviously does not belong either to the victims or to the killer himself.

Joe and his team turn to forensics experts who will examine the blood samples using equipment far more sophisticated than that available to your average crime lab in the hope of teasing out of the samples some clue that will point the detectives in the right direction. In the meantime, Joe and his team will do the traditional grunt work of an investigation in the hope of producing results.

As is usual in these books, particularly in the later entries, the investigation will take Joe across much of Vermont. And as usual, Mayor's descriptions of his native state, its people, geography and climate are part of the joy of reading the book. By now, Mayor's long-time readers must feel as though they know Vermont nearly as intimately as half of the people who live there.

My one quibble with this book is all of the science that Mayor parades before us. The book involves a good deal of cutting-edge technology and science, and it includes several trips to crime labs, including the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Mayor has obviously spent a lot of time researching the science involved here and apparently spent time at the BNL himself while researching the book.

But like a graduate student who's determined to cram every last note he's taken into his dissertation, Mayor feels compelled to explain all of the science at great length to the point where your eyes glaze over. The plot slows dramatically at these points, and one is reminded of Elmore Leonard's famous advice to writers, encouraging them to leave out the parts that the readers are going to skip over anyway. The science is important to the solution of the crime, but certainly some of this could have been condensed.

Still, that's a relatively small complaint and while this will not rank among my favorite books in the series, it's still a very welcome addition. In some ways, returning to Vermont to visit Gunther and the rest of the cast always feels like coming home.

Matthew Scudder in Middle Age

I've long believed that Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder series is the best PI series ever written. Some of the books individually stand with any of the classics produced by writers like Raymond Chandler et al., but Block has produced far more books in this series (sixteen and soon to be seventeen) than any of the other "Masters" of the genre. The books are consistently very good if not great, and in addition to writing a number of inventive and absorbing plots, Block has created a cast of memorable, fully-drawn characters in addition to Scudder, the main protagonist. He has also allowed them all to age and become more complex through the years so that reading one of these books is like returning to visit with a lot of old and very interesting friends. If that weren't enough, Block has also built a lushly-drawn set--Scudder's New York City--in which these stories take place.

Even the Wicked is the thirteenth book in the series. Scudder is in his middle fifties, now happily married and domesticated. He's a much more mellow character than he was in the early years, and this particular book is also a bit tamer than some of the earlier entries. The violence is not as gruesome and doesn't seem as threatening; the sex is not as hot and bothered, and Scudder doesn't have to get very violent with anyone.

Which is not to say that this isn't a very enjoyable read. Scudder is forced to deal with a series of complicated crimes, perpetrated by at least three separate characters. In the main case, a vigilante, inspired by a newspaper columnist, is ridding NYC of despicable characters that the legal system is unable to touch for one reason or another. After claiming three scumbag victims, he announced that his next target will be a criminal defense attorney who has won a number of high profile cases. The attorney hires Scudder to try to find the killer, even though the police are working night and day to find him as well.

Scudder arranges protection for the attorney and gets on the job. At the same time a friend asks Matt to look into the shooting death of an AIDS victim who was killed in a city park. The police are not pursuing the case very aggressively and are apparently ready to write it off as a random act of violence in the big city. Matt, of course, will not dismiss it so easily.

Scudder works the two investigations in and around evenings with his wife, Elaine, and again engages the services of TJ, the street kid who first appeared as Scudder's semi-sidekick a few books earlier. It's fun to watch him work and it's also fun to listen to the banter among the characters. And inevitably, Matt's dogged persistence will pay dividends in the end.

This book certainly doesn't have the hard edge of some of the earlier Scudder novels, but you wouldn't expect a fifty-five-year-old PI to be wrapped as tightly and to act as fiercely as the young, alcoholic ex-cop that we first met in The Sins of the Fathers. After a very long wait, we are about to finally get a new Matthew Scudder novel, A Drop of the Hard Stuff, which is set earlier in Scudder's career. I would expect this book to resemble much more closely in tone some of the best books in the series, and I, for one, can hardly wait.

Worth Looking For: California Fire and Life

Browsing the shelves of the Poisoned Pen, my favorite mystery bookstore, I recently found a reprint of Don Winslow's 1999 novel, California Fire and Life. Winslow's The Power of the Dog is one of my favorite books of all time, and I've thoroughly enjoyed everything else of his that I've read. This is an earlier book, but it's an excellent read that will also teach you everything you ever wanted to know about arson investigation.

In an effort to protect a witness from certain death, Orange County Sheriff's Department arson investigator Jack Wade fabricated evidence and then lied under oath. Betrayed by a fellow deputy, "Accidently" Bently, Jack is convicted of perjury and bounced from the department.


Twelve years later, Jack is a claims investigator for California Fire and Life. A multi-million dollar home and furniture collection belonging to a Russian immigrant, Nicky Vale, goes up in smoke. Sadly, Nicky's beautiful young wife goes up along with it. Jack's old nemisis, "Accidently" spends about fifteen minutes investigating and rules the fire accidental.

Jack's investigation quickly points to a lot of problelms with Bently's verdict, including the fact that the victim had no smoke in her lungs. Beyond that, Jack finds the family dog locked outside of the house, and Jack knows full well that, while an arsonist might burn up his wife, he will never burn his dog along with her.


It's clear to Jack that the fire was deliberately set. Nicky Vale claims to have a solid alibi--he was home with Mama all night. But Jack quickly breaks the alibi and discovers that Nicky had the means, motive and opportunity to set the blaze. Jack denies the claim, only to discover that this sets him in conflict not only with Nicky Vale but with his own employer as well.


From that point on, the book is a wild ride with Jack battling Russian mobsters, Vietnamese hoods, insurance scammers, and the executives of California Fire and Life. Don't expect to get any sleep until you've finished the book.