Poison by John Lescroart

Attorney Dismas Hardy has vowed to himself and to his family that he’d take no more murder clients after being shot twice a year earlier due to his involvement in a murder trial.  He has made this life decision well known to his legal partners, to his best friend policeman, Abe Glisksy, to his private investigator, Wyatt Hunt and to everyone else he cared about in his life.  Then Abby Jarvis, a former client calls from jail after being arrested for the murder of her boss, Grant Carver (aka Wagner in the advance uncorrected copy.)  Hardy had represented Abby eleven years earlier on a DUI/ vehicular manslaughter charge.  After some jail time, Abby was hired as a bookkeeper by Grant Carver who ran a successful family business that included four of his grown children.  One of the siblings and Abby’s best friend, Gloria had protested the original forensic finding of heart failure as Grant’s cause of death and that sparked further investigation.  In a second scanning of Grant’s body, the poison, aconite was found in his system.  An examination of the company’s financial books showed Abby had been receiving some ‘under the table’ compensation for years and that compounded with her legal record and her mention in Grant’s will led to her arrest.  Abby acknowledged an ongoing secret romantic relationship with Grant that exposed Grant as father to her young daughter.  Abby swore that the extra compensation was with Grant’s blessing as child support for her daughter as well as hush money.  No one openly knew of Abby and Grant’s intimate involvement.

Hardy puts his P.I. Wyatt Hunt to work in hopes of finding other suspects… like one of the grown siblings not quite being treated fairly or Grant’s former girlfriend, Stacy or Grant’s adopted son, Joey who was not involved in the family business.  Before Wyatt can make significant progress, David Chang, a casual friend of Hardy’s son is shot and killed.  Then when Stacy is shot and killed in the same manner, even the police suspect someone other than Abby must be involved.  Could all three of these murders be connected, if so, how?  As the truth is unraveled, Hardy once again has knowledge of a murderer who could put him and his family in danger.  Should he excuse himself from the case as he had promised his wife or take the risk and see that his client is cleared?

I’ve been reading Lescroart’s Dismas Hardy novels since 1989’s Dead Irish.  Over the years, the author has expanded his protagonists to include family members, friends and business associates of Hardy.  But Lescroart’s work is at its best with Hardy front and center in the plot as he is in Poison.  For Hardy’s well-being, he needs to slow down his work load and assign the big murder cases to his associates but for the reader’s sake, we need his direct involvement.  Please Mr. Lescroart, more Dismas Hardy.

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the advance look.

A Conspiracy of Paper

David Liss is another one of those prolific authors that, until now, has not been reviewed in the blog. He’s an author of more than 30 books, and A Conspiracy of Paper was the historical thriller of the year in 2000. The story is set in London in 1719 and it involves Benjamin Weaver’s attempt to solve the mystery of his father’s murder, a father from whom he has been estranged for 10 years. His father was a stock trader at the time when the stock markets and the use of paper money were just coming into common usage. Weaver, a Jew who changed his name to limit anyone’s knowledge of his connection to his father, Lienzo, a Jewish “stock-jobber.” Not all stock-jobber’s were Jewish, but all stock-jobber’s were mistrusted, but to be a Jewish stock-jobber was sure to elicit hate from all who dealt with them, and Lienzo was widely hated.

The story itself had an excellent cast of characters to fill out the action. I thought the eventual resolution was convoluted, but as interesting as the story, was the historical aspects of this. Liss’ characters ran the gamut from wealthy aristocrats to beggars and whores. Weaver was a retired pugilist, who was not practicing his Judaism. The place was nearly lawless and the judicial system was corrupt. He made a living by finding thieves and stolen goods for various aristocrats. Sometimes he worked as a protector for the wealthy. So, he was a thug who interacted at the edge of aristocracy. At the time in London, Jews could still not own property. If a Jew stepped on the wrong toes with minor misdeeds, their livelihood, if not their lives, were in danger. This novel was not a short read, but it strikes me as having been scholarly accurate in depicting the times about which it was written. I’m definitely willing to read another Liss novel.

Deadeye Dick

It was time for me to have an apparently light and quick read, and I stumbled on a Kurt Vonnegut novel that I had not read, Deadeye Dick, one of his later novels, written in 1982 when Vonnegut was 50. I always felt some connection to Vonnegut, not only because I love his books (especially Breakfast of Champions) and his humor, but because he was also a Hoosier. His family owned the main hardware chain in Indianapolis, and when I was in medical school there in the 70s, I thought it was really cool to see a Vonnegut Hardware store, and I passed by one of those stores on the way too and from the medical center.

The venue for Deadeye Dick was Midland, Ohio, the same town as Breakfast of Champions, a generic, uninspiring, and mostly uneventful Midwestern town. Vonnegut’s main character is Rudy Waltz who is the product of wealthy (by inheritance) and unproductive parents who have little understanding of the world around them. He begins his book with a line that only Vonnegut would write, “To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.”

Waltz’s life was altered at the age of 12 when he accidently shot and killed a pregnant woman. The cops nicknamed him Deadeye Dick, and the name stuck to him, one that people constantly used behind his back for the rest of his life. The book revolved around his life-long guilt for that senseless act, as well as the impact it left on his family. He lived out his life as an asexual nightshift pharmacist in Midland. Vonnegut wrote, “That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.” But, he wrote a play about his life which made it to Broadway for one performance only. Similarly, his older brother blundered his way to being President of NBC before being dumped from the company for the network’s awful ratings.

So, it’s a story about Vonnegut’s view that life is ultimately meaningless: “We all see our lives as stories, it seems to me, and I am convinced that psychologists and sociologists and historians and so on would find it useful to acknowledge that. If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.” How depressing, and I disagree, but still find it worth reading – no one writes quite like him.

Glass Houses

Unashamedly, I love Louise Penny. Her 12-book series about Armand Gamache and the cast of characters is as rich and enjoyable as any writing that I’ve seen in the crime genre. Her primary venue is Three Pines which is a tiny, hidden and idyllic village on the outskirts of Montreal - a special place. In her latest novel, Glass Houses, Ms. Penny wrote in her author’s note: “Three Pines is a state of mind. When we choose tolerance over hate. Kindness over cruelty. Goodness over bullying. When we choose to be hopeful, not cynical. Then we live in Three Pines.” For me to admit that I like Louise Penny as much as Daniel Silva is very high praise.

In Glass Houses, Gamache has been promoted to Chief Superintendent of the Surete du Quebec. He’s now the big boss of the entire police force for the province of Quebec. As the book opens, Gamache is testifying in a murder trial in front of a new Judge, Maureen Corriveau. Although he’s on the same side as Chief Crown Prosecutor Zalmoanowitz, there was an obvious friction between him and Gamache. Why would the prosecutor work so hard to humiliate Gamache on the stand when he was trying to get a conviction of the defendant?

Penny’s story is about the drug trade that moves down the St. Lawrence Seaway and through Quebec into the lucrative U.S. drug market. While the cartels fight for territory and law enforcement continues to lose the war on drugs, people on both sides of the border are dying in record numbers from the use of those substances. Penny also interjects an ancient Spanish figure called a cobrador who is nonviolent, but who is meant to invoke shame and humiliation upon someone who has gone unpunished for an evil deed. It is fascinating and caused great angst among the citizens of Three Pines, nearly all of whom feel guilty for some secret in their pasts.

Glass Houses could be a stand-alone novel, but if you’ve not read Penny before, it’s my advice to start with the first book, Still Life. Then work your way through the novels and enjoy the character development as Penny intended. You won’t be disappointed, I promise.