After a
successful legal career, Alafair Burke started writing mysteries. She has two series
to her credit, one that features a Portland, Oregon, district attorney and the
other with a New York police detective. More recently she’s been writing
stand-alone crime fiction, the latest of which was released in April. I went
back in time a bit and read the third of her nonseries novels, The
Ex (Harper, 2016).
This strong
legal thriller opens when Olivia Randall, a successful defense attorney in New
York, is called by the teenage daughter of her college fiancé whom she dumped
shortly after graduation. The daughter demands that Randall defend her father,
who has been taken to police headquarters on suspicion of murder. Along with
two other victims, the father of a young man who committed a random shooting in
a New York train station three years earlier has himself been killed. Jack
Harris lost his wife in that train station mass murder and has been pursuing
legal action against the father for supplying guns to his troubled son. That Harris
was in the vicinity at the time the father was killed clinches the case in the
mind of the police.
Randall is
convinced, despite the intervening 20 years, that she still knows Harris well
enough to know he could not be guilty, and she jumps headlong into his defense.
All the while she relives their earlier relationship and the circumstances that
finally led to its end. This is a compelling legal procedural on one level and
on another a study of how people who are close still manage to misread and
misinterpret each other. A great double plot twist at the end.
Finalist
for MWA’s 2017 Best Mystery award. Library
Journal starred review.
·
Hardcover: 304 pages
·
Publisher: Harper; First
Edition (January 26, 2016)
·
Language: English
·
ISBN-10: 0062390481
·
ISBN-13: 978-0062390486
Aubrey
Hamilton ©2019
Aubrey
Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and
reads mysteries at night.
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