Copyright 2003 by Belfry Holdings, Inc. Published by Bantam Dell, a division of Random House, Inc, New York

I go back and forth… Is Harlan Coben my favorite author? Or is it John Grisham? They are both terrific writers. They always keep me interested. Grisham, of course, writes about the legal profession while Coben is more of a mainstream mystery writer. How to choose, how to choose.

Why choose? Why not enjoy both?

This Grisham offering is about the rise and fall of Clay Carter, a lowly DC public defender who stumbles into a series of seemingly random murders committed by people with no prior history of violence. He is pondering the odd cases when he is approached by Max Pace, a self-described “fixer” employed by a large pharmaceutical company that has realized that a drug being tested using the city’s poor as guinea pigs, causes this unprovoked violence. The drug has been withdrawn but Pace, representing the unnamed company, wants to nip any nasty lawsuits in the bud. He offers Carter a lucrative deal to sign the parents of the young murderers to contracts that give them $5 million each to forfeit their right to sue.. They all take the deal – why wouldn’t they? – and Carter gets a hefty multi-million dollar payment and financing to start his own firm. He also gets the inside track on another bad drug, Dyloft, which is causing bladder tumors. He launches a class-action lawsuit against the manufacturer and is soon neck-deep in the cutthroat world of mass torts. He is spectacularly successful and collects $100 million in legal fees. From legal defender to the King of Torts in just 6 months! It was a spectacular rise. And, of course, it leads to a spectacular fall.

How it all falls apart is fascinating. The plot is helped along by a interesting group of employees and romantic interests. And it gave me an opportunity to imagine, for a few hours, what life would be like if I became spectacularly wealthy.

It will never happen but it was fun to imagine.

8 out of 10.

Copyright 2021 by Max Seeck. Published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

This edition was translated from the original Finnish. This is a problem because, as with most translations, the names of character and locations were not translated. So the main character is Yusuf Pepple. One of the murder victims is Eliel Zetterborg who lives on Laivasillankatu. Pepple’s colleagues are Jessica Niemi, Nina Ruska, Rasmus Susikoski and Jami Harjula. One of the suspects is Camilla Adlerkreutz. You get the idea – names in this book are a problem. Reading involves a constant struggle to mentally pronounce or to at least figure out who is being referenced as some of the names are very similar to someone who speaks English. Books that involve struggle are not fun.

The first murder – with several to follow – is the stabbing of Eliel Zetterborg, the fabulously rich CEO of RealEst, a Finnish manufacturing conglomerate – in his palatial condo in Helsinki. There are many suspects initially as he was widely despised, but the murderer was waiting for him inside his condo, with the alarm set, which narrows the suspect list greatly. Soon some clues appear that were clearly left by the murderer to taunt the police. Those clues lead to a deaf mute, the son of one of Zetterborg’s lieutenants. How he became a deaf mute eventually becomes a central question in the plot. It involves an incident that occurred 30 years earlier in a remote Finnish hunting lodge.

It is a well-crafted plot and there are several subplots that are also interesting. But I couldn’t get past the struggle in reading it.

3 out of 10.