Blood Flag

March 21, 2016
Bestseller Martini’s uneven 14th novel featuring California lawyers Paul Madriani and Harry Hinds (after 2015’s The Enemy Inside) finds Paul and Harry flush with cash after sharing in the windfall from a whistle-blower who helped the feds nail some offshore tax cheats. Their bank balance enables them to take on a new client with a limited ability to pay, Emma Brauer, who is suspected of euthanizing her ailing 89-year-old father, Robert. Some months earlier, Robert became agitated when he received a safe-deposit box key in the mail, along with a paper that may have been a military ID. Some disturbing phone calls later prompted him to ask Emma to take the items out of the house. Right after she did, a burglar tore the place apart. Emma’s arrest leads to further tragedy. That Robert’s death has international implications raises the stakes, but the growing implausibility of the plot comes as a letdown after the book’s powerful opening sections. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM.

March 15, 2016
After World War II veteran Robert Brauer dies under mysterious circumstances, San Diego attorney Paul Madriani--hired to defend Brauer's daughter on charges of assisting a suicide--discovers the old man was not the only member of his former Army unit to meet with a suspicious end. Shortly before his death, Brauer received a package from an Army buddy containing a key to a safe-deposit box. No sooner has Madriani signed on to the case than his plucky young assistant, Sofia, is murdered, and Madriani and his legal partner, Harry Hinds, find themselves in the middle of a strange plot involving a Nazi relic known as the Blood Flag. Unbeknownst to the lawyers--or the U.S. government--the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad also is in hot pursuit of the flag, which reputedly was bloodied by an accomplice of Hitler's during the future Fuhrer's attempted takeover of Munich's city hall in 1923. Working from inside the California Department of Justice, Mossad will take extreme measures to get their hands on the flag--and they're not the only ones. The trail leads Madriani to the rich and powerful married man with whom Sofia, who was pregnant when she died, was having an affair. Madriani's sensitive wife, Joselyn, who was protective of Sofia, proves her husband's ace in the hole in the investigation. The foreign operatives aren't very interesting, and the international intrigue seems like an add-on to the plot. But otherwise, the novel boasts the sure-handed, suspenseful storytelling that Martini's fans have come to expect. Martini holds serve with his 14th Paul Madriani thriller, in which Hitler's evil legacy continues to haunt survivors of World War II.

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May 1, 2016
In the latest Paul Madriani novel, Paul and his partner, Harry Hinds, take on the case of an elderly woman who's accused of killing her father. Emma Brauer spins an arresting story: her father recently received a parcel in the mail, sent to him by a man he served with in WWI, and Emma believes the contents of the package are responsible for his death. It seems an impossible-to-prove proposition, even if it's true, but when Paul's assistant is murdered, he begins to think Emma's story might not be so improbable after all. As he digs deeper, he uncovers a conspiracy that reaches back into history and involves, apparently, multiple homicides in the present day. Tightly constructed and efficiently written in the manner of the other entrees in this long-running series, this one sticks tightly to a proven formula, but that won't bother series fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2015

Defending a woman accused of a mercy killing, Paul Madriani discovers that her father had received a package shortly before being hospitalized hinting at a Nazi relic called the Blood Flag that disappeared at war's end. What's more, others in his unit have met suspicious deaths. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

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