The Substitution Order

Starred review from May 27, 2019
Prominent Virginia attorney Kevin Moore, the narrator of this exceptional legal thriller from Clark (The Jezebel Remedy), is reduced to working in a fast-food sandwich shop after a drug and alcohol binge led to the suspension of his law license and the end of his marriage. He’s hoping to keep his head down and wait for reinstatement, but his life is upended when he’s approached at the sandwich shop by a stranger who calls himself Caleb. Caleb represents an organization that monitors the information received by “virtually every group with a disciplinary board” to identify people vulnerable to being coerced into participating in a fraud scheme. In Kevin’s case, Caleb asks him to agree to a lie—that he committed malpractice a few years earlier by failing to execute a purchase order for land that cost a client millions. When Kevin refuses, he’s set up for a probation violation and framed for even more serious charges. Clark does a masterly job combining Kevin’s plans to get himself out from under with a powerful portrayal of human frailty. John Grisham fans won’t want to miss this one. Agent, Sloan Harris, ICM.

June 1, 2019
A disgraced attorney encounters a threatening stranger who demands that he join a multimillion dollar insurance scam. "I deserve better than this misery," says Virginia attorney Kevin Moore in Clark's (The Jezebel Remedy, 2015, etc.) entertaining legal thriller. But that's not entirely true. Kevin has earned his trouble after a three-month cocaine and booze binge that led him to cheat on his wife with a stripper and land in the middle of a police raid. Now he's sober, on probation, facing divorce and disbarment, and making sandwiches in a cut-rate sub shop. One day a stranger shows up and urges him to participate in a multimillion dollar legal swindle. When Kevin refuses, the threats begin, and soon he's arrested on new (and trumped-up) charges. As if that's not grim enough, he suffers a stroke. But Kevin isn't about to become a victim, and he can wield the law like a weapon, so he puts a plan for payback in motion. The author of four other clever, amusing legal novels, Clark is not nearly as well known as he should be. A retired Virginia circuit court judge, he knows his way around the system, using the law as a foundation for novels that never rely too heavily on action or courtroom pyrotechnics. Instead, he explores the rural South and the people who live there. He writes with hilarious insight about subjects that include but are not limited to the legal and medical professions, trucks with "Southern by birth, Rebel by the Grace of God" bumper stickers, and the impossibility of the presumption of innocence for anyone who has ever been arrested. "Once you make a single mistake, everything else you do is viewed through a warped lens," Kevin laments. After a mistake, revenge is deeply satisfying--and so is this book.

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Starred review from June 1, 2019
Kevin Moore is paying dearly for a few months of abusing alcohol and cocaine. Once called the Clooney of the courtroom, he's on parole, with his license to practice law suspended and his wife of 18 years divorcing him. On top of all that, he's been reduced to managing the a sandwich shop in southwest Virginia. When a stranger comes to the shop and invites Moore to join in an insurance scam, Moore says no. Days later, he's set up by a state probation officer, who provides a false urine test showing meth use and puts drugs and a gun in Moore's car. That night Moore suffers a stroke. With his story of the setup hard for others to believe, Moore convalesces with an old friend and relies increasingly on his 20-year-old counterman, Blaine Richardson, a tech wizard who peddles weed on the side, as he looks to the law for justice. A retired judge, Clark veers a bit into the weeds with Moore's maneuvering of the law, but his clear prose and well-drawn characters carry the day in this solid legal thriller.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)