The Missing Piece

June 1, 2021

Exonerated after years in prison for the rape and murder of his girlfriend, lowlife Paul Riley is released--and is promptly dispatched himself. Wes Farrell, the DA who helped convict Paul, is now practicing law with the redoubtable Dismas Hardy and agrees to represent the father of the murdered woman, a main suspect in the new case. Then the father vanishes, and Dismas and Wes send PI Abe Glitsky after him through a landscape of grieving parents, crooked cops, and determined vigilantes. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2021
In the nineteenth Dismas Hardy/Abe Glitsky mystery, the murder of a man, Paul Riley, who was recently exonerated for an 11-year-old crime leads defense lawyer Hardy and private investigator Glitsky into a morass of lies and manipulation. Questions abound. Was the murdered man really innocent of the crime that put him behind bars? Could someone connected to the original case be involved in this homicide? Hardy's law partner, Wes Farrell, the DA who convicted Riley, now agrees to defend Doug Rush, the man accused of killing Riley, but Rush vanishes without a trace, leaving Farrell, Hardy, and Glitsky without a client and with a morass of suspects. What sets Lescroart apart from many of his fellow legal-thriller writers is his focus on complex themes like morality, conscience, and personal responsibility. In the Hardy/Glitsky novels, characters make mistakes; they pause to question their own motives; they behave, in short, like living, breathing, ever-muddled real people. Fans of the long-running series will be lining up to read this one.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 6, 2021
Bestseller Lescroart’s excellent 22nd Dismas Hardy novel (after 2019’s The Rule of Law) finds Wes Farrell, a defense attorney in the San Francisco law firm in which he and Dismas are partners, in the throes of an existential crisis. Wes no longer wants to defend people he believes are guilty. Meanwhile, Paul Riley is exonerated and released from prison after serving 11 years of his life sentence for the rape and murder of Dana Rush. Shortly thereafter, Paul is fatally shot. Doug Rush, Dana’s father, is assaulted by the police officers who come to interview him; they subsequently arrest him for Paul’s murder. Dismas and Wes agree to defend Doug. When their client disappears after bail is set, Wes hires PI Abe Glitsky to locate him. The plot cleverly entwines the police investigation with Abe’s, keeping readers deliciously off balance with each new possible motive and suspect. Lescroart delves into the concepts of the presumptions of both guilt or innocence while maintaining a fast pace and delivering a finale full of surprises. This long-running series remains as fresh as ever. Agent: Barney Karpfinger, Karpfinger Agency.

October 1, 2021
A former San Francisco DA-turned-defense attorney takes the case of a man he's convinced is guilty and ends up pursuing it to the ends of the earth. Maybe Wes Farrell is too accustomed to seeing every criminal defendant as guilty. Maybe he's just burned out. But he can't believe that Doug Rush is innocent of killing Paul Riley, who was convicted of raping and murdering Rush's daughter, Dana, 11 years ago. Riley had recently been released from prison after the Exoneration Initiative extracted a confession from someone else, and his father unhesitatingly told inspectors Ken Yamashiro and Eric Waverly that he saw Rush running from the scene after Riley was shot. And even though there's a certain amount of sympathy for Rush after the two homicide investigators are caught on a bystander's cellphone camera beating him up during his arrest, the case against him seems so open-and-shut that Farrell can't believe a word his client says. Soon enough, Rush, who's jeopardized his million-dollar bail by skipping his preliminary hearing, is found shot to death in the Shakespeare Garden, and the case seems closed for good. But not to Farrell's partner, Dismas Hardy, or his investigator, ex-Homicide head Abe Glitsky, or even Farrell, who suddenly finds himself fighting for justice for a client he never believed when he was alive. Calling on his trademark eye for the big picture and his sensitivity to changing trends in the perception of the legal system, Lescroart crafts his most searing anatomy of that system since A Certain Justice (1995). The current head of SFPD Homicide gets the last word: "This just in. Injustice abounds. Get used to it."

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.