Keith Ingraham is a top banker based in Hong Kong. He and his wife, Isabelle are bringing their young daughter to Miami for a surgical procedure, and Jack offers to pick them up at the airport. As they walk off the plane the police arrest Isabelle and accuse her of conspiring to kill a man while a student at University of Miami. Jack and Keith watch in horror as she is taken away.
The convenience of fiction makes Jack the perfect one to represent Isabelle, and he soon finds that she is being accused of conspiring to kill the man who raped her. There has been a number of books written recently that center around date-rape on a college campus, and I do believe that this is an important story to tell. Grippando's story is a bit different, because the crime took place over a decade before, and Isabelle has since built a wonderful new life in Hong Kong.
Isabelle swears that she had nothing to do with the planning or murder of Gabriel Sosa, and although Jack wants to believe her, conflicts continue to pop up in her story. There is her violent ex-boyfriend who insists she knew he was involved in the crime, and her domineering father who wants someone else to defend her. Isabelle has no relationship with her father, but it isn't until the last few chapters that we are privy to what caused the final estrangement between them.
This book is as well written as all of Grippando's books, and once I started I had trouble putting it down. I think that my biggest complaint is that there was very little involvement with his old standby characters. His wife Andie, an ex-FBI agent who generally plays a big role in his cases was conspicuously missing from the excitement. I assume Grippando wants us to see the softer "mother role" that she now plays, but I missed her involvement.
I would have loved to see a bit more of his best buddy, Theo Knight, who serves as a body guard as well as a friend. We first met Theo in Grippando's first Swyteck legal thriller, when Jack saves him from the death sentence he was facing. They have faced trouble together as the series continued, and this novel seemed to cast him as a very minor participant.
All in all this is a well-written book on a very important topic.
- Beverly
Publisher - HarperCollins Publishers
Date of Publication - February 21, 2016