About this item
From the "master of the legal thriller" (Chicago Sun-Times) John Lescroart comes a dramatic family drama in which attorney Dismas Hardy is called on to defend a former client against the accusation of murder.Dismas Hardy is looking forward to cutting back his work hours and easing into retirement after recovering from two gunshot wounds. He is determined to spend more time with his family and even reconnect with his distant son, Vincent. But Dismas just can't stay away from the courtroom for long and soon he is pulled into an intense family drama with fatal consequences. Grant Carver, the vigorous patriarch of the Carver family and its four-generations owned family business, has been murdered. His bookkeeper Abby Jarvis, whom Hardy had defended on a DUI charge eleven years prior, is the prime suspect after police discover she's been embezzling funds from the company - but she insists she did not kill her boss. As he prepares to defend her, Dismas investigates the Carver clan and discovers the dark, twisted secrets within the family. It seems that Abby was not the only one who stood to profit from the company's $25 million dollar market value. From jealous children to gold-digging girlfriends, Dismas has his work cut out for him in sifting through mud flinging, backstabbing, and accusations of blackmail. But Dismas not only has to save his client's life but his own, as it soon becomes clear that someone has a painted a target on his back, too. With Lescroart's signature "smart, riveting, and utterly compelling" (Brad Thor, #1 New York Times bestselling author) prose, this whip smart and nail-bitingly suspenseful thriller will keep you guessing until the very end.
About the Author
John Lescroart (pronounced "less-kwah") is a big believer in hard work and single-minded dedication, although he'll acknowledge that a little luck never hurts. Now a New York Times bestselling author whose books have been translated into 16 languages in more than 75 countries, John wrote his first novel in college and the second one a year after he graduated from Cal Berkeley in 1970The only hitch was that he didn't even try to publish either of these books until fourteen years later, when finally, at his wife Lisa's urging, he submitted Son of Holmes to New York publishers--and got two offers, one in hardcover, within six weeks!But about six years before that first hardcover publication, John's ambition to become a working novelist began to take shape. At that time, as Johnny Capo of Johnny Capo and His Real Good Band, he'd been performing his own songs for several years at clubs and saloons in the San Francisco Bay Area. On his 30th birthday, figuring that if he hadn't made it in music by then, he never would, he retired from the music business.He'd been writing all along, and didn't stop now, although his emphasis changed from music first, prose second, to the other way around. Within two months of his last musical gig, he finished a novel, Sunburn that drew on his experiences in Spain. Since John didn't know anyone in the publishing world, he sent the manuscript to his old high school English teacher, who was not enthusiastic. Fortunately, the teacher left the pages on his bedside table, and his wife picked them up and read them. She loved the book and submitted it in John's name to The Joseph Henry Jackson Award, given yearly by the San Francisco Foundation for Best Novel by a California author. Much to John's astonishment, SUNBURN beat out 280 other entrants, including Interview With A Vampire, for the prize.Though Sunburn wasn't to be published for another four years, and then only in paperback, the award changed John's approach to writing. He started to think he might make a living as an author, something he'd never previously believed possible for a "regular guy with no connections." He started paying for his writing habit by working a succession of "day jobs"--everything from a computer programmer with the telephone company, to Ad Director of Guitar Player Magazine, to moving man, house painter, bartender (at the real Little Shamrock bar in San Francisco), legal secretary, fundraising executive, and management consultant writing briefs on coal transportation for the Interstate Commerce Commission!!John moved to Los Angeles and in the next three years finished three long novels, the last of them featuring a private investigator who shared the name Dismas Hardy (and very little else) with the man who would become John's well-known attorney/hero. Since he'd gotten Sunburn published without using a literary agent (an old friend had shown it to a se
