Synopsis
After six exciting thrillers in seven years, bestselling author James Grippando is at last bringing back the main character from his blockbuster debut novel, The Pardon.
Miami lawyer Jack Swyteck is in trouble. With more than a decade of experience in the criminal courts, Jack doesn't handle many civil cases. But this one is different. His ex-girlfriend is being sued because she thought she was going to die.
When Jessie Merrill was diagnosed with a deadly disease, she worked a deal with an insurance company to get cash fast. In exchange, a group of wealthy investors were supposed to collect on the policy at her death. But Jessie was misdiagnosed, and the investors want their money back. Now.
At the trial, Jack pulls off a brilliant victory and Jessie gets to keep the $1.5 million from the investors. Two days later, her body turns up in Jack's bathtub. As the evidence mounts against him, Jack finds himself on a collision course with dark secrets from the...
Publishers Weekly
Grippando might not be the most lapidary of legal thriller writers, but he certainly has the imagination and research skills to plot up a storm. Readers of his seventh book (after A King's Ransom) will find themselves riveted as Miami criminal lawyer Jack Swyteck the hero of Grippando's first thriller, The Pardon returns to discover himself and his family under attack from several corners. Jessie Merrill, a particularly hot old flame of Jack's who's now dying of ALS, has hired him in an unusual civil case involving a "viatical settlement," in which she sells an insurance policy in return for an immediate cash payment. But the doctors were wrong: Jessie isn't dying, and the shadowy consortium of Russian mobsters who bought her policy are now suing to get their money back. Jack and Jessie win the case; Jack realizes that he and the Russians have been scammed; and when a principal character turns up dead in the Swyteck bathtub, Jack's unstable wife soon joined by a vengeful prosecutor thinks Jack did the dirty deed. There's also a tough and dangerous young Cuban woman with reasons of her own for wanting the Russians brought down, a likable roughneck whom Jack once rescued from death row, and enough mean-spirited federal agents and prosecutors to settle a career's worth of scores for a lawyer-turned-writer like Grippando, who was a partner in Janet Reno's firm before he took up the quill. (Sept.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.