Book description
Vance Hayes died while joyriding on a snowmobile late one night and
breaking through thin ice near the Wisconsin Dells. The cold-hearted,
hard-headed lawyer goes unmourned by clients, colleagues, or anyone
else-including his reluctant eulogist, fellow attorney Rep Pennyworth.
In fact, interest in Hayes' death is merely perfunctory until it
inter-sects with the perils facing charmingly ingenuous
Vietnamese-American court reporter Sue Key, tied to Milwaukee's Hmong
community. Could it be that Hayes died not because of any of the rotten
and vicious things he spent his career doing to literally hundreds of
people, but because of the one decent, human endeavor that marked his
adult life? The situation is further complicated by deer season when for
several weeks in the fall, “up north” is home to 700,000 people carrying
loaded firearms. And by the presence of a gaggle of lawyers, patrician
and plebian, grouped around Indianapolis and Milwaukee, not to mention a
private eye, an e-tailer into books, and a seedy photographer. Can Rep
and his shrewd wife Melissa find in them the key to solving the puzzle
of Vance Hayes' death? Intellectual banter remains the key appeal in
this third entry in the Rep and Melissa Pennyworth series. Having taken
on Kansas City in Unforced Error (2004), the Midwest-trotting couple
find themselves in Milwaukee when Rep is asked to deliver the eulogy for
a fellow member of the bar, Vance Hayes, a very unpopular fellow who
appears to have finally received his comeuppance. Likable copyright
attorney Rep turns sleuth when he stumbles on the fact that Hayes'
travels to Asia may have led to his murder. Clean plotting, combined
with the marital repartee, makes this a solid winner. Mike Bowen, a
trial lawyer practicing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is the author of
numerous mystery novels, including Screenscam (2002), which introduced
Rep and Melissa Pennyworth. Bowen has been a member and moderator of
panels at several Bouchercons and has made presentations at numerous
other mystery-related events. He wrote the entry on The American Legal
System for the Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing, and was a
member of the panels that selected the winner of the 1995 Edgar Award
for Best Mystery and the 1996 Edgar Award for Best Critical or
Biographical Work. Bowen graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School in
1976. While at Harvard, he served on the Board of Editors of the Harvard
Law Review, and was a member of the winning team and was named the best
oralist in the Ames Competition (moot court). Bowen lives with his wife,
Sara Armbruster Bowen and their younger children, John, Marguerite and
James, in Fox Point, a suburb of Milwaukee.
