Twenty

November 9, 2020
Bestseller Grippando’s subpar 17th thriller featuring Florida defense attorney Jack Swyteck (after 2020’s The Big Lie) opens with a harrowing scene. Swyteck’s daughter, Righley, goes to kindergarten at Riverside Day School, and his FBI agent wife, Andie, is attending a parents’ event there when a gunman kills more than a dozen people. Righley and Andie, who rushed to Righley’s classroom, are traumatized but uninjured. Andie is later stunned when 18-year-old Xavier Khoury, the son of a close friend, confesses to the shooting. Swyteck reluctantly accepts Xavier as a client, in the hopes of getting him multiple life sentences instead of the death penalty, at the behest of a parent who lost a child but wants to avoid drawn-out court battles. Meanwhile, Andie is put on the hot seat when Riverside seeks to avoid liability for the incident. Despite Xavier’s confession, Swyteck pursues the possibility that it was false. The characters are paper-thin, and an over-the-top reveal undermines any suspension of disbelief. Grippando has done better. Agent: Richard Pine, InkWell Management.

December 15, 2020
A shooting at a Florida school counts 20 wounded or dead. Among the students, but thankfully not among the victims, is Jack Swyteck's daughter. When a fellow student (the son of a Muslim man) confesses to the shootings, Jack, a defense attorney, initially refuses to take his case. But then he's persuaded to change his mind by an unlikely person: the parent of a child who died in the shootings. The Swyteck novels have always incorporated complex, sometimes controversial subjects, and this one tackles a tragically hot topic. School shootings have been in and out of the news for the past few years, and, to his credit, Grippando doesn't sensationalize the issue. He presents an evenhanded, intelligent discussion structured, of course, around a smartly plotted mystery. It should be noted, too, that the novel's characters are fully realized and abundantly human, not the stick figures spouting talking points one finds in much hot-topic fiction. Even with nearly 30 books under his belt, Grippando shows no signs of falling into a rut.

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December 11, 2020

Eighteen-year-old Xavier Khoury confesses to killing 14 people in a shooting spree at his school and the district attorney is confident of a death penalty verdict based on the anti-Muslim sentiment in the community. Xavier's mother asks Miami attorney Jack Swyteck, whose daughter is a kindergartener at the school, to represent Xavier in proceedings to reduce the sentence to 14 consecutive life sentences in prison, which is a speedier process and also less onerous for the victims' families. When Al-Qaeda claims responsibility for the mass shooting, the crime intersects with federal terrorism departments and jurisdictional arguments ensue. Jack tries to withdraw as counsel for family reasons but the request is denied by the district judge. His investigation is hampered by governmental interference as well as his uncommunicative client. Either Xavier was groomed for the shooting by extremist factions or he is being set up and is actually innocent. VERDICT This 17th book in the "Jack Swyteck" series (after The Big Lie) is a low-key legal thriller for the first two-thirds of the book, after which the action heats up to inferno proportions. Hold on to your seats after that. Fans of Grippando and of legal thrillers will not be disappointed.--Edward Goldberg, Syosset P.L., NY

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