Cane and Abe

November 24, 2014
Abe Beckham, the narrator of much of this gripping but flawed stand-alone from bestseller Grippando (Need You Now), still mourns the death of his first wife, Samantha Vine. That’s why Abe, senior trial counsel at the state attorney’s office in Miami-Dade County, keeps close contact with Samantha’s family. This closeness doesn’t sit well with his second wife, Angelina, who wants him to cut all ties with the Vines. Abe complicates his professional life by monitoring the murder investigation of an old flame, Miami attorney Tyla Tomkins, whose mangled body was found in the Everglades. Is Tyla a victim of the machete-wielding serial killer known as Cutter? When Angelina disappears, FBI agent Victoria Santos wonders whether Abe was still romantically involved with Tyla. Grippando keeps the tension high with plausible twists, until the plot comes apart in a rushed ending. Agent: Richard Pine, Inkwell Management.

April 1, 2014

When a woman's mutilated body is discovered in the Everglades, Abe Beckham, a top prosecutor at the Miami State Attorney's Office, becomes a top suspect. He'd had an encounter with the woman after his wife Samantha's untimely death, and his new wife, Angelina, has vanished, too. With a 30,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2014
A stand-alone from the creator of adventurous lawyer Jack Swyteck (Black Horizon, 2014, etc.) that plumbs a Miami prosecutor's nightmare when a serial killer strikes a little too close to home.The Cutter, as he's been dubbed, has used a machete on four white women who'd dated black men, capping his gruesome murders by sprinkling ashes on his victims' foreheads. So why is his fifth victim highflying black attorney Tyla Tomkins, and where are the ashes this time? These are big problems, but Abe Beckham, a white senior trial counsel at the Miami-Dade Office of the State Attorney, is preoccupied with a more personal problem: how much FBI agent Victoria Santos, who's coordinating the hunt for the Cutter, will find out about his own relationship with Tyla. Abe, who married his old girlfriend Angelina after his African-American first wife, Samantha Vine, died, already has his hands full with Samantha's bipolar older brother, J.T., whose erratic behavior is constantly testing the promise Abe made his dying wife to look after him. Now he finds himself pondering possible links between the killings and the powerful Cortinas Sugar company and stressing out when Santos uncovers evidence that he'd seen Tyla a lot more recently than he'd told either her or Angelina. The pot comes to a rolling boil when Angelina vanishes shortly after capping a fight with Abe by throwing him out of their house. Has Abe killed his missing wife? Is her disappearance an attempt to incriminate him? Is Abe the Cutter? Did he kill Tyla as a copycat? And if he isn't and he didn't, who's gone to such trouble to frame him? If only the answers to these questions were as good as the questions. As it is, Grippando supplies a satisfyingly wild ride through Presumed Innocent territory before the inevitable letdown.

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November 15, 2014
Here's another fine stand-alone from the author of the Jack Swyteck legal thrillers. Abe Beckham, a Florida assistant state's attorney, has a tangled history: he's married to Angelina, but before that, he was married to Samantha, who died; and before that, he was in a relationship with Angelina. Oh, and there's Tyla, an attorney Abe had something going with several years ago, and who has just been murdered, apparently not long after making several calls to Abe's cell phone (he says he never got the calls). And there's a serial killer, dubbed Cutter, who might be responsible for Tyla's death, although a disagreeable FBI agent is convinced Abe's behind the murder, just as she's convinced Abe's responsible for the sudden disappearance of Angelina. Grippando writes the heck out of this labyrinthine story, keeping us flipping the pages at a frantic pace, trying to figure out what's going on here. Abe is a very well-drawn characterwe're not quite sure whether we should like him or notand somehow Grippando manages to answer all of the story's questions without making the end of the book feel contrived. Very nicely done.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)