Lassiter 07 - Flesh and Bones

TOP HARDBOILED MYSTERY BESTSELLER"I was sitting at the end of the bar sipping single-malt Scotch when I spotted the tall blond woman with the large green eyes and the small gray gun."The next thing Jake Lassiter knows, the woman pumps three bullets into the man on the next barstool.Lassiter, the linebacker-turned-lawyer, has a new client.She's stunning model Chrissy Bernhardt, and the dead man is her wealthy father. The defense? Chrissy claims that she's recently recovered repressed memories of having been sexually abused by her father. Jake wants to believe her but suspects that the memories were either implanted by a shady psychiatrist or fabricated by Chrissy herself. Complicating the situation, Jake falls for his client, clouding his judgment. Is she an anguished victim or a cold-blooded killer? And what about her brother, who stands to inherit a fortune if Chrissy goes to prison? Jake wades into a quagmire of dirty water deals, big money, and family corruption, all leading to an explosive finale.From BooklistPro football player turned lawyer Jake Lassiter is savoring a drink at a South Beach bar when a beautiful young woman shoots the man on the next bar stool and faints in Lassiter's arms. It's one way to get clients, he figures. The woman, Chrissy Bernhardt, is charged with the first-degree murder of her father, whom Chrissy believes abused her as a child. Lassiter takes the case, which is complicated by the fact that Chrissy's repressed memories of her father's abuse have been "unlocked" with the help of a therapist who turns out to be her late mother's former lover. The seventh Lassiter novel continues the series' steady improvement. Lassiter is smart, tough, funny, and very human. He's coming on fast as one of the most entertaining series characters in contemporary crime fiction. Wes LukowskyFrom Kirkus ReviewsNot even a lawyer as light on his feet as Jake Lassiter can find much wiggle room when he himself was one of the dozens of witnesses who watched his client, model Chrissy Bernhardt, walk up to her father in a crowded bar and shoot him three times, sending him spiraling into a fatal heart attack. And things just get worse when Chrissy's psychiatrist, obliging Dr. Lawrence Schein, hands Jake solid-gold evidence of Chrissy's childhood abuse by Harry Bernhardt--something Schein claims is a perfect defense, though it's nothing more or less, to Jake's disillusioned eyes, than the perfect motive for premeditated murder. With no hope of winning acquittal for a client who tells him she wanted to hurt the old man as badly as he'd hurt her and who cheerfully disclaims the slightest sign of remorse, Jake's only prayer is to go for manslaughter. But armed with all those tapes of Dr. Schein's (including the prizewinner, in which Chrissy tells him she's just bought the gun she's going to shoot her father with), who could doubt the premeditation the prosecution alleges--unless of course it's Jake himself, who's broken his usual rule against sleeping with his clients in favor of the deeper rule that draws him to every guilty-looking dame in Miami? Jake just never learns about women--luckily for his fans, who'll find this impossible case, his seventh (Fool Me Twice, 1995, etc.), more tightly wound than any since his debut in To Speak for the Dead (1990). -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.