Showing results by author "William Lashner" in All Categories

Justin Chase is the perfect barkeep, tending bar as he lives his life, in a state of Zen serenity, until Birdie Grackle, a foul-mouthed alcoholic, walks into his bar and makes a startling confession. Six years ago Justin’s life was ripped apart when he discovered his mother’s bludgeoned corpse. Now Justin’s father is serving a life sentence and Justin drowns his emotions in a pool of inner peace. But when Birdie claims he murdered Justin’s mother for cash, Justin is hurled back to the emotions, back to the past, and, most frightening of all, back to the father he tried to leave behind.

Philadelphia lawyer Victor Carl is just itching for the opportunity to sell out. Then good fortune comes knocking in the guise of William Prescott III, an attorney from one of the city's most prestigious firms. Prescott wants Victor to represent a councilman's aide who is on trial, along with his boss, for extortion, arson, and murder. And all Carl has to do is show up, shut up, and follow Prescott's lead. But it soon becomes clear that someone's setting him and his client up to take a long, hard fall.

Elizabeth Webster is happy to stay under the radar (and under her bangs) until middle school is dead and gone. But when star swimmer Henry Harrison asks her to tutor him in math, it's not linear equations Henry really needs help with - it's a flower-scented, poodle-skirt-wearing, head-tossing ghost who's calling out Elizabeth's name.

Oliver Cross is fresh out of jail. His plans for the future are to live out his days in regret, back pain, and a bottle of Lone Star. But when he finds out his granddaughter, a wild child who reminds him of his late wife, has vanished - bless her hell-raising heart - Oliver jumps parole. With a sketchy teen and an abandoned dog, he hits the blacktop to find her. On the road and on the run from a vengeful Russian drug dealer, Oliver finds himself on a trip across America and into his own past, fueled by fumes from a Ford F-250 and a reason to live.

At a low point in his lowly career, Victor finds himself skulking through the streets of Philadelphia carrying a bag full of money for an ambitious politician. It is a rotten job on the wrong side of anyone’s line, but with bag in hand Victor is suddenly hobnobbing with the city’s elite, filling his bank account, and having sex with the politician’s gorgeous and deranged sister. But just when Victor begins to think he’s got a future in the political game, one of his payoffs ends up in the pocket of a dead woman, and Victor goes from bagman to fall guy.

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.

A lifetime ago, brutally efficient fixer Phil Kubiak coldly cleaned up the messes of shady clients from Miami to Las Vegas by any means necessary - short of murder. Now he's one eye and one working leg short of the man he used to be, scarred beyond recognition, and with the feds and criminal organizations in hot pursuit. Throwing back sour beer in a dingy bar, Phil recounts the long story of his bitter life to the only person left to listen.

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.

Jon Willing was just a teenager when he and his buddies Augie and Ben stole a fortune in drug money. Brazen with youth and stoned out of their gourds, they thought they had the perfect plan for getting away with it. They were wrong. Twenty-five years later, Jon’s marriage is in ruins, his kids are virtual strangers, and the recession has decimated his finances. When he finds Augie murdered in Vegas, Jon knows his past has risen from the grave to grab him by the throat. Now Jon Willing faces a choice: run to a paradise of wine and women and endless sunshine or confront the demons from his past and fight for what’s left of his imperfect suburban life.

J.D. Scrbacek has just won the biggest trial of his career, but even as he crows to the press, his entire life blows sky-high. Was the bomb meant for him, or for his mobster client? In this seaside casino town where the tables run hot and the tensions run high, the odds say the attorney is a marked man. Alone and on the run, Scrbacek flees into the city's forgotten underbelly, a ruined corridor called Crapstown, where he is forced to confront the ghosts of his past, his present, and his future.

Used to defending an unpleasant parade of mob enforcers, two-bit hoods, and other riffraff, Victor Carl - lawyer, loser, and occasional hapless hero - has a new case. A terrified young woman has offered him an unusual yet substantial proposition: to prove that the recent suicide of Philadelphia heiress Jacqueline Shaw was not a suicide at all, but murder.

So believes Victor Carl, the antithesis of the classic sharp-eyed, cool, and dispassionate lawyer. Late one night Victor gets a panicked phone call from an old law school buddy. Guy Forrest claims he's just found the body of his fiancee in the house they shared. The victim is the entracing Hailey Prouix, a woman with numerous charms who had mesmerized Victor - and every other man she ever met.

Young Victor Carl is a fool for love and money, but he's not a blind fool. When Victor is propositioned by the woman of his dreams, he knows it's too good to be true. She offers him the perfect job, a prosperous future, and, best of all, when her tongue is in his mouth, she tastes like strawberries. But it isn't long before Victor realizes that to keep these prizes, he must keep his client - currently in the clink for murder - from spilling the truth about what really happened the night of the killing.

In a nation still recovering from the nuclear tragedies of forty years earlier, Clyde is working a dead-end guaranteed job at a diner, and Moonis is incarcerated in a Labor Camp for the Malcontented. But when Moonis's sister, Cecily, goes missing, the old friends escape their prisons to search for her in post-fallout America.

Over the course of his shady legal career, Victor Carl has made a host of bad decisions, but letting his ex-fiancee 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.

A defense attorney who lives his life in shades of gray, Victor Carl fights all the right fights for all the wrong reasons. With a failing legal practice, a dead-end love life, and a pile of unpaid traffic tickets, Victor skates on the razor's edge of legal ethics in search of the easy buck. But the one absolute in Victor's life is loyalty, especially to a client, even if he happens to be dead.