Blood and Bone

New York Times bestselling author William Lashner returns with a brilliantly twisty tale that probes the dark side of the law -- and man

Unlike the rest of you, I cheerfully admit to my own utter selfishness. I am self-made, self-absorbed, self-serving, self-referential, even self-deprecating, in a charming sort of way. In short, I am all the selfs except selfless. Yet every so often, I run across a force of nature that shakes my sublime self-centeredness to its very roots. Something that tears through the landscape like a tornado, leaving nothing but ruin and reexamination in its wake. Something like Bob.
--Victor Carl

A beautiful young woman is dead, her husband convicted of the murder. In seeking a new trial for the husband, defense attorney Victor Carl must confront not only a determined prosecutor and a police detective who might have set up his client, but also a strange little busybody named Bob.

Bob has the aspiration, one could even say compulsion, to help those around him. And it usually works out well for all concerned, except when it ends in blood. But Victor doesn’t know that . . . yet.

Thanks to Bob, Victor is suddenly dressing better, dating a stunning woman, and both his economic prospects and his teeth are gleaming. It’s all good, until Victor finds a troubling connection between Bob and the murdered wife. Is Bob a kind of saint or is this obsessive Good Samaritan, in reality, a murderer?

"You want to know what deceit tastes like?
It's sweet. Like honey."

Over the course of his shady legal career, Victor Carl has made a host of bad decisions, but letting his ex-fiancée, Julia, fall back into his life and into his bed might be the worst. Julia's husband has just been murdered, her fingerprints are all over the crime scene, and $1.7 million in cash has inexplicably vanished. If Victor didn't know better, he might think Julia was setting him up.

But Julia is drop-dead gorgeous and lust trumps reason 24/7 in Victor Carl's world. Victor wants to believe the Beatles were right, that all you need is love. But why are the cops accusing Victor of murder? And what is the murder weapon doing in his bedroom? And who is the dead woman in the freezer?

Suddenly, the wary lawyer is no longer fighting to rekindle a lost love . . . he's fighting to save himself.

A stained legal career spent defending mob enforcers, two-bit hoods, and other dregs of humanity has left Philadelphia lawyer Victor Carl jaded and resentful -- until a new client appears to offer him an escape and a big payday. Caroline Shaw, the desperate scion of a prominent Main Line dynasty, wants him to prove that her sister Jacqueline's recent suicide was, in fact, murder before Caroline suffers a similar fate.

It must have been a hell of a night. One of those long, dangerous nights where the world shifts and doors open. A night of bad judgment and wrong turns, of weariness and hilarity and a hard sexual charge that both frightens and compels. A night where your life changes irrevocably, for better or for worse, but who the hell cares, so long as it changes.

It must have been a night just like that, yeah, if only I could remember it.

All Victor Carl knows is that he’s just woken up with his suit in tatters, his socks missing, and a stinging pain in his chest thanks to a new tattoo he doesn’t remember getting: a heart inscribed with the name Chantal Adair.

My apartment is trashed, my partnership is cracking up, I’m drinking too much, flirting with reporters, sleeping with Realtors. Frankly, I’m in desperate need of something hard and clean in my life, and finding Chantal is all I have.

Is Chantal Adair the love of Victor’s life or a terrible drunken mistake? Victor intends to find out, but right now he’s got bigger concerns. His client, a wanted man, needs to come in out of the cold, and he’s got a stolen painting for Victor to use as leverage.

But someone is not happy that the painting has surfaced. Or that the client is threatening to tell all. Or that Victor is sniffing around for information about Chantal Adair. The closer Victor comes to figuring it all out, the deeper into danger he falls, as the ghosts of the past return to claim what’s theirs.

Ethically adventurous Philadelphia lawyer Victor Carl usually does the right thing, but often for the wrong reasons. When old law school classmate Guy Forrest is accused of murdering his beautiful lover, Hailey Prouix, in their Main Line love nest, Carl agrees to represent him -- while keeping silent about his own prior romantic involvement with the victim, and his present determination to see that his client is punished for the brutal crime. But once Carl sets the machinery of retribution in motion, it may be impossible to stop it, even after his certainty begins to crack. Now Victor Carl must race across the country to uncover shocking truths: Who, really, was Hailey Prouix? And why is a killer still waiting in her shadow?