Genre: Legal Thriller
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Phillip Margolin’s legal thriller, Violent Crimes: An Amanda Jaffe Novel, kept me up a good part of the night as I tried to put all of the pieces together. Margolin gives us several murders, questionable business practices, a son who admits to killing his father...but probably didn’t, and an innocent ex-military man being set up to take the fall for several murders.
The protagonist in this series, attorney Amanda Jaffe, fights every battle with a quest for the truth and fights enemies on several fronts in order to defend her client. In Violent Crimes she works with her investigator to defend two men whom she believes to be innocent and finds possible conflicts of interests along the way.
This book is relevant to today’s politics and makes one wonder how far people will go to accrue immense wealth. I found it a bit overly convoluted at times, but the author did a good job bringing it all together as the book progressed. Although he threw in little glimpses of Amanda’s private life, I would like to have seen a bit more. It would have served to soften the book a bit and given the reader a break from all of the murder and mayhem.
That being said, Margolin is a master of murder and mayhem, and this novel does showcase what he does best. As always, villains are frightening, his heroes are fearless and his book fulfills the promise of an exciting few days of page turning.
- Beverly
Publisher - Harper
Date of Publication - February 9, 2016
