In his latest legal thriller, Randy Singer tells the story of Landon Reed, a disgraced college football star who served time in prison for his role in fixing games. Fresh out of prison, he completes law school and joins a seasoned criminal defense attorney's practice. He quickly becomes enmeshed in a complex money laundering case, and then lawyers in his firm start getting killed. The question is, will he be next?
Singer's tone and pace are steady and compelling, keeping the reader turning the pages while he slowly reveals the story. The lawyers start dying about halfway through, when the urgency picks up without slowing down until the end and the surprising denouement. The plot has some hard-to-believe elements, specifically the villain, his rise to power, and the tangled web of revenge he weaves. But the main characters are believable and likeable. Landon deals with real struggles of redemption and integrity, family and career.
Singer writes as a Christian, and Landon's jailhouse conversion provides a theme for the novel, but the faith factor does not loom large. The result is an accessible novel for secular readers, without the sex and foul language that mark so many mainstream novels these days, but with a positive message. Although many reviewers will compare Singer to a certain mega-selling writer of legal thrillers, that's unfair to Singer; his work stands on its own.
Thanks to the Tyndale Blog Network for the complimentary review copy!
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