Book description
When a frat boy finds himself on trial in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for
piracy on the high seas, Lawyer Rep Pennyworth, suspects he's being used
as an unwitting accomplice in a cheap publicity stunt. Meanwhile Rep's
wife Melissa, a professor, gets caught in the middle of a verbal
firefight between two colleagues that soon escalates into burglary,
theft, jury-tampering, forgery of an explosive papal document from World
War II-and murder. Melissa wants to protect a naïve undergraduate who
might be implicated. But when one of the other suspects makes Melissa a
cast-iron alibi, her search for the truth leads through a maze of gray
lies-including her own. Dealing with an investigative reporter who's
still having flashbacks to 1968, a fellow professor whose acute
political correctness masks ruthless academic ambition, an engineer
whose father's heart attack may have been either suicide or murder, and
a brace of cunning lawyers out for blood, Rep and Melissa have to
combine their talents to stay off the casualty list.... Milwaukee
copyright attorney Rep Pennyworth's fourth case begins with piracy on
Lake Michigan and rapidly gets crazier. "Sex or swim," Jimmy
Clevenger, an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
tells engineer Carolyn Hoeckstra when he shows up on her boat at
midnight. Choosing to swim the half-mile to shore, she brings charges
for attempted rape, and then, when the proceedings end in a mistrial,
arranges to have him charged again in federal court for piracy. None of
this would be Rep's problem if his wife Melissa, an English professor at
UWM, hadn't gotten involved with thriller-meister Taylor Gates's
brainstorm about one-upping Dan Brown by writing an apparently
fact-based novel that actually makes the Church look good -- or if Rep
himself had steered clear of professor Harald Angstrom, a colleague of
Melissa struggling to extricate himself from a contract to write a
centennial history of the Goettinger Corporation. Sound complicated? It
gets even murkier with the news that Goettinger's CEO, who died recently
under circumstances that will soon sound a lot more suspicious, was
Carolyn Hoeckstra's father. As usual in this waggish series (Screenscam,
2001, etc.), you'll need a scorecard to follow the cascading
complications. But Bowen's powers of invention are so florid and his
satirical touch so bright that most readers won't care who gets carted
off to jail. 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.
