Violent Crimes: An Amanda Jaffe Novel

Something sinister is going on at the law firm of Hamilton, Masterson. A top employee is found beaten to death. Then one of the senior partners turns up dead. What’s going on here? It’s up to lawyer Amanda Jaffe, her top investigator, and the local police to uncover what’s behind all this chaos. Is this the work of an ecowarrior whose gone too far? A rogue partner with something to hide? Or a soldier-turned-lawyer with a history of violence?

Violent Crimes hits plenty of the classic thriller buttons — wrongful imprisonment, shadowy conspiracy, eleventh hour twist — but manages to do so without feeling cliché. Margolin accomplishes this in a surprisingly simple and effective way: he allows the characters to do their jobs. We have a lawyer who avoids being an action star, cops who actually get to collect evidence and do the job, and villains whose motivations and schemes make sense. It’s amazing what competent characters bring to a thriller!

And Margolin balances these many ingredients well. What could have been an overdone mess instead feels like a complex, evolving sequence of events. It all comes together quite nicely, avoiding the heavy-handedness common to the genre.