Victor Carl

Hard-luck Philadelphia lawyer Victor Carl is just itching for the opportunity to sell out. Then good fortune comes knocking at his door in the guise of William Prescott III, a blue-blood 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. It's the juiciest, highest-profile courtroom extravaganza in years -- 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. Victor Carl may be desperate and unethical but he's no one's patsy. And to survive in this legal snake pit of secrets, lies, and lethal double-crosses, he's going to play the game his way.

"I suppose every hundred million dollars has its own sordid story and the hundred million I am chasing is no exception..." So begins Veritas, William Lashner's riveting follow-up to his bestselling debut novel, Hostile Witness. Victor Carl -- lawyer, loser, hapless hero of Hostile Witness, and a Philadelphian way out of his element -- has come to the sweat-drenched jungles of Belize to chase his fortune. Finding it is something else entirely. Coerced into defending an unpleasant parade of mob enforcers, two-bit hoods, and other Philadelphian riffraff, Carl wants out of his shabby, squalid life more than ever. So when a terrified young woman offers Carl an unusual -- but substantial -- proposition, he leaps at the opportunity to trade in his grubby existence for a life of wealthy excess. The job -- proving that the recent suicide of wealthy Philadelphian heiress Jacqueline Shaw was not a suicide at all but murder -- plunges Carl into an eerie shadow world, where events buried deep in the past exert an awful weight in the present, a world of overturned gravesites, gruesome secrets, and a haunted, lonely estate that houses the broken and dying heirs of a once-powerful family. Simultaneously caught up in an exploding mob war and the machinations of an avaricious cult, Carl realizes too late that he's in way over his head, as he races against time to collect his fee and get out alive. As Carl edges closer to the truth, a truth that is concealed in the mists of a bygone era and now awaits him in the rainforests of Belize, he learns firsthand that the most terrifying darkness crouches not in the heart of the jungle surrounding him but in the deepest yearnings of the human soul.

Late one night Victor Carl gets a panicked phone call from an old law school classmate. Guy Forrest claims he has just found the body of his fiancé lying murdered in the house they shared. The victim is Hailey Prouix, for whose love Guy had abandoned his children, his job, his wife, his life. Hailey had mesmerized every man she ever met -- including, unbeknownst to Guy, Victor Carl. Convinced that Guy is Hailey's killer, Victor agrees to represent him, all the while secretly vowing to see justice done, whatever the cost. Victor embarks on a quest that will take him from Philadelphia to Las Vegas to the valleys of West Virginia. He digs further into Hailey Prouix's past and discovers that nothing is as simple as it had seemed, especially the woman he thought he loved. As Guy's murder trial heads toward its shattering conclusion, Victor must find the brutal truth before the mechanism of retribution he himself has set into motion falls like a hatchet, smack on his client's head. Read by Peter Francis James.

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. Like Joey Cheaps, a no-account who takes a knife to the throat down on the waterfront, but not before he shares with his lawyer his part in a terrible crime. With his client murdered, Victor must search for a killer. But solving the crime means investigating the darkest spot in Joey Cheap's misspent youth, sending Victor on a twisting journey that leads to a missing suitcase stuffed with money, photographs of a mysterious naked woman, and a Supreme Court justice with a secret to hide. And most dangerous of all, Victor steps into the crosshairs of a vengeful enemy with a past full of pain and a taste for blood. As thrilling as it is darkly evocative, Past Due is a superb tale of crime and justice that takes the intrepid Victor Carl into brilliant new territory and confirms William Lashner's place among the top suspense writers of our time.

"It must have been a hell of a night, if only I could remember it." All Victor Carl knows is that he's just woken up with his suit in tatters, 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. 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.

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.

The best-selling novels of former attorney William Lashner demonstrate a keen instinct for the weaknesses and passions that drive his characters. In A Killer's Kiss, Victor Carl slips between the sheets with an old love-and may end up getting slapped with murder charges for his lapse of judgment.