Victor Carl ESQ.

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The thing to understand about Victor is that he wants everything we want, money, status, sex, money, but, sadly for him, every time he has a chance for the money and status, he has a code of honor that sabotages his efforts. That code of honor is the bane of his existence, and yet is his greatest attribute, and the key is he doesn’t know its precepts until he tries to step over the line. Each book shows, to his great disappointment, another element of his hidden code. So no, he never gets the money or the status, but the sex sometimes isn’t so bad.

This is the first Victor Carl novel, which set the template for what came after. I was a lawyer at the time, feeling left out of the literary world, so I created a lawyer feeling left out of the legal establishment. Here, Victor is given a golden opportunity to rise and become something, all he has to do is cross one line, one simple line.

"In the tradition of his highly successful colleagues, Grisham and Turow, Lashner has written an absorbing legal thriller. What sets this one apart, though, is the dark, despairing view it takes of human nature. A superb, disturbing read." Booklist

My father once woke me up in the middle of the night to go down to the Roundhouse in Philadelphia to bail out my uncle who had shot someone in the subway. Don't ask, it's a Philly thing. But I started this book in that same little courtroom. It's really the story of the Campbell Soup company, takes place over many generations, has a diary written in the twenties, and all the mysteries are solved in a letter sent by a WWI soldier recalling his time recovering from his war wounds in a hospital in France. I was reading a lot of Edith Wharton, then, which explains a lot.

In true Ross Macdonald fashion, Lashner invents a past that never relinquishes its hold on the present, wreaking havoc in subtle, often deadly fashion. Interestingly, though, the man who unlocks the secrets of the past isn’t an empathetic hero like Macdonald’s Lew Archer, but rather the amoral Victor Carl, blind to both present and past in his quest for profound wealth.

Booklist

True story. There was a guy who murdered his wife to get the life insurance money to give to a stripper who he was sure was in love with him. I mean, who hasn't done such a thing? It turned out the guy played softball with me, was the first basement on my team. Here Victor is sure that his friend is guilty of murder so he decides to take the case just to tank it so his client pays the price. But when it comes down to it, he needs to know for sure. So of course he goes to Vegas. Turns out Due Process is not just a couple of Latin words.

The acclaimed author of Hostile Witness and Bitter Truth is back with the legal thriller of the season—a sizzling tale of murder, innocence, and justice. . . .“William Lashner is remarkable.”—Nelson DeMille

I met this woman once, so beautiful my heart skipped, and as we spoke it turned out she just got out of jail. She was part of the biggest cocaine ring on the east coast, run by a Penn Dental student. So I wrote about her, and that, with a little Anaïs Nin thrown in because when is that not a good idea. It all starts with the murder of a client, Joey Cheaps, a murder which Victor, taking a page out of "The Maltese Falcon", decides he needs to solve.

Lashner, best-selling author of Fatal Flaw, has a rich, sometimes poetic style, but he leavens his prose with humor that fluctuates between morbid and whimsical. This is an extremely good crime novel, and it vaults Lashner into the upper reaches of the hardboiled universe. Booklist (Starred Review)

I'll just give you the first line, which tells everything: "Unlike the rest of you, I cheerfully admit to my own utter selfishness. I am self-made, self-absorbed, self-serving, self-referential, even self-deprecating, in a charming sort of way. In short, I am all the selfs except selfless. Yet every so often, I run across a force of nature that shakes my sublime self-centeredness to its very roots. Something that tears through the landscape like a tornado, leaving nothing but ruin and reexamination in its wake. Something like Bob."

This is a sordidly fascinating story, compellingly told (as usual) with wit, drama, and a delightfully fluid sense of morality. There really is no one quite like Victor Carl, and Dr. Bob is one of the most intriguing supporting characters ever to inhabit a legal thriller. Great fun and a wonderful antidote to the high seriousness of too many legal thrillers. Booklist (Starred Review)

This story involves a museum like the Barnes in Philadelphia, and an art heist, like happened at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and a stolen Rembrandt. But it starts with a tattoo on Victor's chest that he doesn't remember getting. He wonders about the woman who's name is on the tattoo. Is she a huge mistake or the great love of his life. So of course he has to find out. At one point, an old woman says to Victor, "You're a regular Sammy Glick, aren't you?" In order to find out whether that's a compliment or an insult, Victor has to read one of my favorite novels, "What Makes Sammy Run?" by Budd Schulberg. You tell me.

Unlike many legal-thriller writers, who present their protagonists as righteous heroes, Lashner thoroughly enjoys exploring the darker, seamier, grungier side of his lead character, and here he peels back a few more of Victor's layers. Booklist

This one is a romance. A lost love reenters Victor's life. There are dead bodies, too. In these kind of books there usually are. But in this one, the language is a bit different. More hardboiled. Victor is channeling Dashiell Hammett, my favorite crime writer. He doesn't do it as well, who can, but he tries. If you haven't read Hammett you can start with the "Maltese Falcon". You should also try "Red Harvest." Not as famous, no Bogart film attached, and written as a serial, but it might be the most influential book of the Twentieth Century. Every spaghetti western, every fifties television show, "The Seven Samurai", "The Stranger", are all children of "Red Harvest". The book got around. The good ones usually do.

It is so easy to write a mystery or thriller that means little or nothing, that leaves no lasting impression in the reader’s mind. Therefore, it’s particularly delightful when someone such as William Lashner steps up to bat and blasts one clear out of the park, as he does with A Killer’s Kiss.

Cameron Hughes, January Magazine

In my last Victor Carl novel, our boy Victor hits rock bottom, working as a bagman for some congressman with issues. With this book I think Victor finally sees the breadth of his code of honor and what it forbids from him. Things like being a bagman for some congressman with issues. My favorite parts are the bagmen meetings at an old style restaurant in Center City. It's there that he learns the secrets of the Sazerac. The recipe is in the book, but I had to go down to New Orleans to check it out for myself. With a plate of fried oysters it is that legendary perfect thing. Why would I ever drink anything else?

If they gave a Pulitzer Prize for snappy dialogue, William Lashner would be a betting favorite every time…Lashner has a talent for creating memorable characters—or maybe caricatures would be a better word. Either way, they’re a lot of fun. He introduces Victor to a group of bagmen who in another era would have done Damon Runyan proud…So sad to read about in the paper, so much fun to read about in Bagmen.
Philadelphia Inquirer