Bøger af Michael Monhollon

Easy to say- "Robin, you need to leave this alone. Just get back in your car and drive away." Easy to say- "What I think is that you ought to take this young woman's fingerprints, see where she's been in that house and what she's been touching." Easy to say- "You see what the testimony means, your honor. Ms. Starling is most probably an accessory after the fact to the crime of murder." Easy to say- "Let's assume for the moment that I'm a reasonable person, and not some nut-job who goes around dribbling the blood of murder victims on every horizontal surface she comes across." Harder to do It's not as easy as you might think for a woman who's five-foot eleven and wearing a dress to wedge herself through a tiny window with a sill about four or four-and-a-half feet off the ground. Let's just say I managed it and that I'm glad no one was watching. Somehow Robin Starling always manages to do what she needs to do...or at least she always has until now...

Robin Starling, Lady Lawyer "What did Carly say about me?" I asked. "That you were new here and really, really nice, but she understood you'd been fired from your last job for being-" She dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "-something of a loose cannon." The drop in volume was a habit of speech Carly had when she was delivering the goods on someone. "And after those introductions, Chloe chose me over Dave. Interesting. Disconcerting, even." "She said her daughter would be more comfortable with a lady lawyer." I shook my head. Lady lawyer was a phrase I'd be happy to go the rest of my life and never hear again. "You do wonder why she'd be lawyer-shopping in an executive suite. Does it bother you that she seems to have chosen you because she thought you'd be a lightweight?" "Not at all. I'm a blonde female just a few months over thirty-one. I get that kind of thing all the time." Her love life I tore open the protein bar. It was a bit melted from Paul's body heat, but I took a bite and chewed. "Messy, but delicious," I said with my mouth full. "Do you always carry protein bars?" Brooke asked Paul. "One of the benefits of having a fat boyfriend," I said, chewing. "Ouch," Brooke said. "She called you fat." "She called me her boyfriend." "So she did." They both looked at me. Her family life My puppy and I spent Christmas in Charlottesville with my mother and my brother and his family. My father, long estranged from the family after leaving my mother for his veterinary assistant, showed up for lunch, bringing presents. Nobody told me he was coming, and his expression was cautious when he spoke to me-or even looked at me. "Look," I said finally. "I'm not the scary bitch you seem to think I am." "Said the scary bitch in her most belligerent voice," my brother said. "You're not helping," I said. "Sorry." Though he didn't look it. Her professional life Paul said, "I understand the case changed on you this week." I exhaled. "Yes, it did that." "And it wasn't even your fault," Paul said. "What do you mean by that?" "Well, to be fair, all your cases tend to thunder along like a pack of greyhounds." I rolled my eyes. "Just tell us the story," Paul said. "Start from the beginning, right where this exquisitely beautiful woman walks into your office." My eyes slid to Brooke. "Describe her body in as much detail as you'd like," Paul said. "I don't mind. Start with her slim, silky legs, and work your way up."

The one eyewitness to the murder was last seen fleeing the scene in Robin Starling's car. She left her keys lying on the coffee table, but nobody believes it because Robin Starling, a 5'11" thirty-year-old attorney, is representing the accused. Starling is a cross between Stephanie Plum and Perry Mason: She does whatever the heck she wants and relies on constant motion to keep her out of trouble. The tone is light, and the action builds to a crescendo.

Out of the Office and On the Move I slowed as a man in a security uniform came out, but he only stretched his back and swung his arms and watched me as I rolled past. I was in, and the most disturbing thing so far was that the song "Secret Agent Man" kept playing in my head. This just wasn't the kind of thing lawyers did, not any of the ones I knew. For one thing, it was hard to see how I was going to bill anyone 300 dollars an hour for it. Unfortunately, things were about to get a lot more disturbing... Trial by Ambush, the first of the Robin Starling legal thrillers, is a tightly plotted thriller with a light tone and an athletic protagonist with a weak sense of personal modesty.

Two 14-year-olds find a body on the river With a river at their back doors and a little fishing boat, fourteen-year-old Josh and his friends have no need of a car to get where they want to go-though a lot can happen with the turning of the tide. When he and Lauren discover a body on a yacht anchored just inside the river mouth, Josh becomes a person of interest to the police, to the dead man's widow, and to her conniving brother. The river remains a source of awe and adventure, but they've learned to beware of a . . . Slack Tide

She was a lawyer with an unsympathetic client The first day of trial, the defendant bared his nicotine-stained teeth at the jury as it filed into the courtroom. His clothing, combined with his yellow teeth, oily hair, and prominent hooked nose, made him look like Lucifer's indigent second cousin. It soon became clear to everyone, including Robin Starling, his idealistic attorney, that he would have killed Bill Hill if he had felt like it. The only question was, had he felt like it back on that brisk March day?

She should have had that second fritter . . . But instead Robin Starling agrees to represent the D.A.'s sister in a murder trial. An orthopedic surgeon, prominent in local politics, has been found dead in her apartment. Now the D.A. wants help-from the attorney he just tried to get disbarred-and trust seems to be a commodity in short supply. Once again, attorney Robin Starling must risk her career to discover who is lying and who is not, to untangle the intersecting knots of pursuit, love, and betrayal-and to herself find true love while people all around her are engaged in . . . Sexual Misconduct

Robin Starling traces a pistol that arrived in her mail to a recently murdered man who had been cheating on his wife. The police like the wife for the crime. The D.A. likes Robin as an accessory-after-the-fact. Robin, though she feels sympathy for the widow and her young son, likes running with her dog and hanging out with her teddy-bear boyfriend, but she is a young attorney in need of work. The case promises to be the case of her career right up to the moment when everything goes ballistic.

You're a 32-year-old attorney. Five years ago, you had an affair with your boss's daughter. She was seventeen. Though you didn't go to prison, you work somewhere else now. Guilt-ridden, you've managed to put your life back together; then your old girlfriend, now a 23-year-old, dark-eyed beauty, shows up on your doorstep. She's got a gun and a wild tale about the penny-ante drug dealers who are after her. She needs sanctuary. Within days, she will need a lawyer to defend her on a murder charge, and her tales will have only gotten wilder. What will you do? If you're Alan Dougherty, you will take the case, betting everything on the character of the girl you once loved with reckless passion. You will win it all, the case and the girl, or you will lose everything. This time there may be no putting the pieces back together. Guilty Knowledge is a courtroom drama that has everything you expect from a legal crime novel: drug smuggling and money laundering, crime lords and criminal syndicates, and vigilante justice. Alan Dougherty is an idealistic young attorney who must find courage enough to face down the mob, brains enough to solve a brutal murder, and the ingenuity to best an arrogant young prosecutor. The pace and the plotting put it in the ranks of organized-crime fiction.