Shoot the Lawyer Twice
A
Rep and Melissa Pennyworth Mystery
Michael Bowen
Poisoned Pen Press (Hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1-59058-529-1 (1590585291)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59058-529-0 (9781590585290)
Publication Date: October 2008
List Price: $24.95
Synopsis (from
the publisher): When a frat boy finds himself on trial in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, for piracy on the high seas, lawyer Rep Pennyworth suspects
he’s being used as an unwitting accomplice in a cheap
publicity stunt. Meanwhile his wife Melissa, the professor-half of the
couple, gets caught in the middle of a verbal firefight between two
colleagues at a literary conference that soon escalates into burglary,
theft, jury-tampering, forgery of an explosive papal document from
World War II -- and murder.
Melissa wants to protect a naive undergraduate who might be implicated.
But when one of the other suspects makes Melissa a cast-iron alibi, she
finds that her search for the truth leads through a maze of gray lies
-- including her own.
Caught between an investigative reporter who's still having flashbacks
to 1968, a fellow professor whose acute political correctness masks
ruthless academic ambition, an engineer whose father's heart attack may
have been either suicide or murder, and a brace of cunning lawyers out
for blood, Rep and Melissa have to combine their talents to stay off
the casualty list while they figure out what's really going on.
Review:
Reppert "Rep" and Melissa Pennyworth find themselves trapped in a maze
of conflicting agendas involving lawyers (of which Rep is one),
academics (of which Melissa is one), and business executives and more
in Shoot the Lawyer
Twice, the fourth mystery in this series by Michael Bowen.
The plot of Shoot the
Lawyer Twice has so many facets, so many angles, that it's
hard to pick just one to be considered the primary one. Using the
opening chapter as a guide for selection, Jimmy Clevenger is on trial
for piracy on the high seas for uttering the line "sex or swim" to the
female owner of a yacht anchored in Lake Michigan a half-mile off the
coast of Milwaukee. The woman, Carolyn Hoeckstra, jumped overboard and
swam to shore. The legal basis for Jimmy's indictment seems to rest on
nuances of the law, something a battery of attorneys seem perfectly
willing to debate at length, all the while racking up billable hours.
This being a murder mystery, a dead body must make an appearance at
some point, but the victim is not directly related, but not unrelated
either, to the legal case. Harald Angstrom, a colleague of Melissa's
and a client of Rep's, is killed by ingesting a lethal dose of curare.
While Rep follows the case of Jimmy Clevenger, Melissa looks into why
Harald Angstom may have been a threat to someone, enough that they
killed him.
The word "erudite" leaps to mind while reading Shoot the Lawyer Twice.
Rep and Melissa relate to each other and their colleagues in a learned,
scholarly manner, not quite annoyingly highbrow but close.
The narrative is sharply written and the dialog frequently
witty, all in all generally a pleasure to read. The trick comes in
following the plot which is so twisted that the book should have come
with handy notecards to assist readers in matching who is involved with
what. It's also a bit frustrating when something potentially
interesting is introduced (and it's important to pay attention because
the reader is never quite sure if it's significant or even relevant to
the plot) then never mentioned again.
All the effort expended into reading and trying to understand Shoot the Lawyer Twice
would have been worthwhile had the resolution not been so ...
pedestrian. It's really rather disappointing. A plot as complicated and
convoluted as this, and really in many ways cleverly devised, deserved
a more demanding and satisfying conclusion.
Special thanks to Poisoned Pen Press for providing an ARC of Shoot the Lawyer Twice for this review.
Review Copyright © 2008 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved.
Have you read Shoot the Lawyer Twice? How would you rate it?
Mysteries in this series ...
Screenscam
Poisoned Pen Press (Hardcover), October 2001
ISBN-10: 1-890208-91-4 (1890208914)
ISBN-13: 978-1-890208-91-2 (9781890208912)
Unforced Error
Poisoned Pen Press (Hardcover), April 2004
ISBN-10: 1-59058-109-1 (1590581091)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59058-109-4 (9781590581094)
Putting Lipstick
on a Pig
Poisoned Pen Press (Hardcover), July 2006
ISBN-10: 1-59058-287-X (159058287X)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59058-287-9 (9781590582879)
Shoot
the Lawyer Twice
Poisoned Pen Press (Hardcover), October 2008
ISBN-10: 1-59058-529-1 (1590585291)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59058-529-0 (9781590585290)
Omnimystery keywords for Shoot the Lawyer Twice
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