About this item
Leo Maxwell is no ordinary attorney. He spends as much time tracking corrupt politicians and gangland leaders across the Bay area to piece together the facts of a crime as he does crafting courtroom rhetoric. But Leo has never quite recovered from discovering his mother's murdered corpse as a child, or from growing up in the shadow of his brilliant older brother. In Wolf's Revenge, the fifth novel in Lachlan Smith's Shamus Award-winning series, attorney-detective Leo Maxwell seeks an exit strategy from his family's deepening entanglement with a ruthless prison-based gang. Caught between the criminals and the FBI, Leo charts his own path in defending a young woman who was manipulated into brazenly murdering a member of the Aryan Brotherhood in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. When the consequences strike heartbreakingly close to home, Leo, his brother Teddy, and the rest of the family are forced into a winner-takes-all confrontation with men who don't care how many innocents they harm in achieving their goals. As Leo's world collapses, long-held secrets are revealed, transforming his perspective on the aftermath of the tragedy that derailed his childhood and fractured his family twenty-one years ago. Leo comes to realize there's no such thing as fair play in the battle against a prison gang that's already being punished to the full extent of the law. The question then becomes who will get revenge first -- the Maxwells or the sadistic gang leader who pursues them?
About the Author
I'm a lawyer who writes novels. I was a Richard Scowcroft Fellow in the Stegner Program at Stanford and afterward graduated from law school at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall. While in law school, I worked at the San Francisco Public Defender's Office. From day one, I knew that I wanted to write about that world.
I'm an entertainer, not a documentarian, so nothing in the books comes from real life, most of which wouldn't be believable as fiction, anyway. What is real in the books is the drama of idealism colliding with the moral ambiguity of criminal law, and the sleepless anxiety of a young lawyer who has taken on far more than he can handle. I can assure you that Leo's practice is a good deal more exciting than the practices of most lawyers I know.
Happy reading!
