If John Grisham, Carl Hiaasen and Robert B. Parker had a love child, they would have named him Paul Levine and set him loose writing the Jake Lassiter series about an ex-linebacker turned trial lawyer with a nose for tackling the seedy side of life in South Florida … including today’s Kindle eBook of the Day.
Jake Lassiter, former jock turned Miami lawyer, takes on the case of Dr. Roger Salisbury. He’s being sued for malpractice by a beautiful young woman, Melanie Corrigan, widow of a wealthy developer who died on Salisbury’s care. Lassiter wins that case, but the charges just won’t die.
The dead man’s daugter, sportswriter Susan Corrigan, objects to Roger’s acquittal. She tells Jake that Melanie conspired with Salisbury to murder her father. She claims the suit was meant to divert attention from their illicit relationship.
But the widow throws a kink into the story, putting blame on Roger and making a case for herself.
The daughter secretly has the body exhumed to provide proof of her allegations. But she sneaks off with two bodies. The grave robbing tips the city prosecutor to more clues, and he arrests Roger. The charge is murder. That leaves Jake in the middle of a confusing mystery.
(Editor’s Note: All proceeds from the sale of TO SPEAK FOR THE DEAD (Book #1 of the Jake Lassiter Series)
From the reviewers:
Attorney Levine’s lively fiction debut introduces Jake Lassiter, ex-jock turned Miami trial lawyer. Levine spins his tale briskly, his use of medical evidence and legal argument heightening the excitement rather than weighing it down. –Publishers Weekly.
A finely tuned plot from….novelist Levine, who orchestrates his tense courtroom and medical scenes with expert panache, fluid prose, and sly humor. An excellent choice and the first in a series–From Library Journal
“Better than Grisham! I read John Grisham, Scott Turow, Steve Martini, Lisa Scottoline, Linda Fairstein and other writers of legal thrillers. I’m also a lawyer, so I’m a stickler for authenticity. TO SPEAK FOR THE DEAD is maybe my favorite courtroom novel of all time.”
PAUL LEVINE worked as a newspaper reporter, a law professor and a trial lawyer before becoming a full-time novelist. His books have been translated into 23 languages.
Levine won the John D. MacDonald Florida Fiction Award for his Jake Lassiter series. Lassiter appeared in seven novels. He has been described by Booklist as “one of the most entertaining series characters in contemporary crime fiction” and by The Miami Herald as having “a lot more charisma than Perry Mason ever did.”
Levine also wrote 20 episodes of the TV series JAG, which gave him an opportunity to steer a nuclear submarine and land on the deck of an aircraft carrier, all without endangering national security. He has written about beginning his Hollywood career at the “advanced age of 51.”
Levine is a graduate of Penn State University where he majored in journalism and the University of Miami Law School where he he claims he “majored in the swimming pool.”
He was a trial lawyer with, as he says, “the mammoth, filthy rich international law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, where he did not even pretend to know all his partners’ names. He specialized in ‘complex litigation,’ cases so abstruse that even lawyers charging 500 bucks an hour didn’t fully understand them.”
Paul tried hundreds of cases and handled appeals at every level, including the Supreme Court.
Coming in Fall 2011 in hardcover: Lassiter. In it, Lassiter searches for a missing young woman who disappeared years earlier into the maze of Miami’s porn industry. The book will join the current lineup of 7 Jake Lassiter novels.
And here, in the comfort of your own browser, is your free sample: