High Stakes

August 5, 2019
Dobbyn’s pedestrian sixth Knight and Devlin novel (after 2016’s Fatal Odds) takes lawyer Michael Knight from Boston to Romania. When Knight wins a car theft case defending Danny Liu, the young man’s father, the head of the Chinese Merchants’ Association, invites Knight to dinner and offers him an all-expenses-paid vacation at a spa in the Carpathian Mountains. All he has to do in return is bring back a priceless Stradivarius violin, to be found at a violin shop near the resort, for the Boston Symphony concert master. Despite some misgivings, Knight agrees. Once in Romania, he becomes the target of Russian gangs, the Chinese Tong, and dodgy Romanians. What he wasn’t told by the grateful Mr. Liu is that the violin may hold the key to the whereabouts of a fabulous treasure amassed by Vlad the Impaler. Knight’s senior law partner, Lex Devlin, and Boston deputy district attorney Billy Coyne lend a hand. Dobbyn offers no surprises, no wit, and no profound depth of feeling. This is for those who like action-packed escapist fiction, spiced with a dash of Dracula lore.

September 1, 2019
Dracula. Everybody knows who he is, but maybe fewer know that the bloodsucker is based on a real person, a fifteenth-century Romanian tyrant of exceptional viciousness. In Dobbyn's telling, the historical Dracula hid a vast treasure somewhere in the Carpathians, and looking for it has occupied a lot of people ever since. That's the backstory for this wild ride of a novel, which begins when lawyer Michael Knight is asked to fetch a violin from a Romanian shop. A fine thriller scene follows, as Michael and his wife battle a hit squad on a moving ski lift. The old fiddle may contain clues to the location of the treasure, which makes Michael an object of interest to crime syndicates. The fear is that, in the syndicates' hands, the treasure "could triple their power to make the world suffer." Dobbyn breathes fresh life into hoary thriller conventions, often with a touch of humor. When the good guys are jumped in an alley, they adopt a unique fighting mode: "We both dropped to the ground. We were flat on our backs."(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)