The Last Goodbye

Novelist Reed Arvin's second bestselling effort follows the exploits of bottom-feeding Atlanta attorney Jack Hammond as he hobnobs with bluebloods backstage at the opera and gets down and dirty with denizens of the toughest housing project in the South. Actor Dylan Baker once again proves both agile and effective in rendering the colorfully drawn characters. What happens when an Alabama-born country music fan falls in love with a married diva with a shady background? Listeners might think there's too much stretch for the elastic in this high-tech murder mystery, but they would be mistaken. R.O. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

Starred review from December 8, 2003
"As usual, the story begins with a woman crying." So says Atlanta lawyer Jack Hammond in this mesmerizing thriller about a good man caught in a web of bad love and murder. Beautiful client Violeta Ramirez is doing the crying on behalf of her dope-dealer boyfriend when Jack tumbles so hard for her his high-flying legal career is grounded and Violeta ends up dead. Two years later, Jack is working out of his one-man law office fishing for clients at the bottom of the criminal pool when he begins investigating the suspicious overdose death of his old college pal, Doug Townsend. With the help of a local hacker, Nightmare, Jack unlocks Doug's computer and stumbles into a quagmire involving the deaths of eight hepatitis C patients who were all enrolled in an experimental drug trial gone horribly wrong. Doug was also strangely obsessed with beautiful African-American opera singer Michele Sonnier, as is Jack after one look at her photos and a night at the opera. That her husband is the billionaire CEO of a local drug firm with its own hep C drug makes the liaison even more dangerous. After finding the disgraced researcher who headed the botched drug trial, Jack and his lowlife helpers begin to make real headway in solving the case. Even though melancholy, wisecracking Jack is a lawyer, this isn't a legal thriller so much as a knight-in-shining armor tale with the hero cast in the mold of the great Travis McGee. It's not Grisham that Arvin (The Will
) should be compared to, but the incomparable John D. MacDonald. Those readers who value intelligence, fine writing and action will find it all in this outstanding novel. 100,000 first printing.