Marked Man
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15
Ratings1
Average rating3
It must have been a hell of a night. One of those long, dangerous nights where the world shifts and doors open. A night of bad judgment and wrong turns, of weariness and hilarity and a hard sexual charge that both frightens and compels. A night where your life changes irrevocably, for better or for worse, but who the hell cares, so long as it changes.It must have been a night just like that, yeah, if only I could remember it.All Victor Carl knows is that he's just woken up with his suit in tatters, his socks missing, and a stinging pain in his chest thanks to a new tattoo he doesn't remember getting: a heart inscribed with the name Chantal Adair.My apartment is trashed, my partnership is cracking up, I'm drinking too much, flirting with reporters, sleeping with Realtors. Frankly, I'm in desperate need of something hard and clean in my life, and finding Chantal is all I have.Is Chantal Adair the love of Victor's life or a terrible drunken mistake? Victor intends to find out, but right now he's got bigger concerns. His client, a wanted man, needs to come in out of the cold, and he's got a stolen painting for Victor to use as leverage.But someone is not happy that the painting has surfaced. Or that the client is threatening to tell all. Or that Victor is sniffing around for information about Chantal Adair. The closer Victor comes to figuring it all out, the deeper into danger he falls, as the ghosts of the past return to claim what's theirs.
Series
4 primary booksVictor Carl is a 4-book series with 4 primary works first released in 1985 with contributions by William Lashner.
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I picked this one up on the recommendation of a reader. Normally, I don't like to step into a series 6 books in, but every now and then I throw caution to the wind.
So Victor Carl is a criminal lawyer of some repute, but most of it not that positive, he has some serious relationship issues, a father in poor health, and an odd taste in clients. He's got an investigator (whose name escapes me, and I've already returned the book) who seems awfully good at his job, has a strange speech pattern, and disappears completely and inexplicably half-way through the book. He's got a partner in his law firm going though some sort of existential crisis that I'd probably only understand if I'd read the previous books.
Carl's got a headache of a case at the beginning of the novel – an elderly Greek woman is on her deathbed (I only mention her ethnicity because she can't seem to go more than a sentence without bringing it up) and she wants to say goodbye to her son, a fugitive. Carl's job is to arrange with the authorities for that meeting to occur. It doesn't take long for Carl to find out that it's not just the authorities looking for the client, his former associates are as well. In the midst of that, speaking of headaches, Carl wakes up one morning, can't remember much about the night before – other than there was a lot of alcohol, a blonde, and more alcohol involved – with a woman's name tattooed on his chest. He just has no idea whose name that is.
Believe it or not – that's not all there is to this book. A whole lot of plot lines – many of which overlap in very odd ways – Carl's got to save his own skin, save his client's, get his client to see his mother, find out who belongs to that name (and how it got on him), help his partner with a case and her crisis....aaand a few other things. On the whole, Lashner keeps things moving enough to keep you turning pages, yet doesn't let the multiple storylines confuse the reader.
Each character here is something else – all individual, all worth more time than we end up spending with them. More than anything, his characters impressed me. Whether it's the agoraphobic pervert, the taxi driver with a shady past, the lawyer with a dark secret, the stripper trapped by a childhood tragedy – they're all real, they're all human, they're all fully formed. Really strong stuff there.
I wasn't wowed by this book, but I was engaged and entertained. Victor's not as fun as Andy Carpenter, nor his style and case up to the standards of Mickey Haller – but he's no slouch. I'm probably sold enough to track down book one and dip my toe into this stream at least one more time.
