Most Dangerous Place

November 28, 2016
In bestseller Grippando’s competent 13th Jack Swyteck novel (after 2016’s Gone Again), the Florida lawyer comes to the aid of Isabelle “Isa” Bornelli, an old friend’s wife, who’s arrested on arrival at the Miami airport from Hong Kong for the murder of a man who raped her while she was a college student a dozen years earlier. Isa’s apparent inability to provide a straightforward account of what happened back then raises the tension as Swyteck and co-counsel Manny Espinoza plot her defense. Isa, a well-drawn, complex character, has a tortured family history, which becomes clear when her estranged father interjects himself into the case, serving as something of a soapbox for exploring the complicated, often chauvinistic assumptions made about sex crimes. The legal procedures ring true, but when Swyteck operates outside the courtroom, the action takes a melodramatic turn and eventually leads to a violent resolution that’s both convoluted and predictable. Agent: Richard Pine, Inkwell Management.

December 15, 2016
Miami lawyer Jack Swyteck's 25th case is one of his best. The most dangerous place a woman can be, Isabelle Bornelli was told long ago, is in a relationship with a man. Since then the former Venezuelan beauty-pageant contestant has entered a doctoral program in psychology, married high-powered wealth manager Keith Ingraham, and gone off to make her home with him in Hong Kong, far from the University of Miami, where fellow student Gabriel Sosa raped her 12 years earlier. Her illusions of safety end when she gets off a plane in Miami, where she's come to take her 5-year-old, Melany, for surgery to correct the hearing loss brought on by meningitis, and is promptly taken into custody for Sosa's murder. Since Keith is a close friend of Jack, who's on hand to witness the arrest, she's got herself some highly capable representation (Black Horizon, 2014, etc.). But all the other men in her life spell trouble. Her college boyfriend David Kaval prepares to tell the court she egged him and a friend on to kill Sosa shortly after the assault in exchange for a deal that will release him from the prison term his more recent convictions for conspiracy and armed robbery have earned him. Her estranged father, former Venezuelan consul officer Felipe Bornelli, plans to direct her defense along his own lines, even if that means sabotaging Jack. Manuel Espinosa, the slick attorney who gets her released on bail after Jack fails to deliver, insinuates himself into her defense in disquietingly manipulative ways. Even her husband becomes a potential danger when hard-driving prosecutor Sylvia Hunt charges him as an accessory and the couple's two cases are separated, paving the way for a plea bargain for each of them in return for testimony against the other. Grippando gets underway with a bang and never lets up, springing a series of carefully calibrated surprises in and out of the courtroom guaranteed to catch even the canniest readers unaware.

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December 15, 2016
Near the end of Grippando's new legal thriller, his hero, Miami attorney Jack Swyteck, all but throws his hands in the air when he laments, For once, please, I need someone to tell me everything there is to know. Readers will sympathize. His client, a Venezuelan beauty married to a megabucks money manager, has been arrested for murdering the fellow who raped her years ago. Well, not murder but conspiracy to murder, because maybe she wasn't there when the killing went down. And maybe she wasn't raped after all. Swyteck's lawyer colleague latches onto this as a way of beating the murder rap: No motive, no murder. There are few courtroom confrontations; the plot is mostly Swyteck's attempts to get at the truth under this thick covering of lies. Some readers may feel the obfuscation works all too well and makes the novel a struggle rather than a pleasure. Still, this will find its audience among Grippando fans accustomed to his methodical way of doing business.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)