MURDER TO THE PEOPLE
The sixties aren't just a bad memory in the tenth riveting installment of Dennis Carstens' Marc Kadella legal thriller mystery series. Bucked up by global warming, socialist politics, and hormones, a group of college students model activism-run-amok when the urge to "do good" turns to corruption, armed robbery, embezzlement, and murder.
Professor Ben Sokol is exactly as you'd image him: a single, fifty-something-year-old history teacher, schooled in radical anti-Reagan pacifism of the 80s; an underappreciated, self-believing genius-with a dose of rage bubbling just beneath the surface.
Seemingly taking a page out of A People's History of the United States, an out-of-left-field lecture pronouncing that capitalism itself caused the Great Depression lands Ben in the driver's seat he's always dreamed of: the darling of the impressionable Midwest State-Minnesota University student body and High Priest of the Left.
But when a student named Luke approaches Ben, distraught by family tragedy, the socialist professor and his trusty pupils trade their "Save the Whale" bumper stickers in for ski masks-and hatch a plot to rob the very banks that bankrupted Luke's grandfather and left him for dead.
Meanwhile, hotshot attorney Marc Kadella is batting clean-up for the world's most acrimonious divorce proceedings-fodder for entertaining distraction amid the pulse-pounding bank heists. But Marc's case is about to get uglier: because it's about to lead to murder. And that murder, coincidentally, is tied to Lake Country Federal-the very same chain of banks Ben and his band are targeting.
Like worker bees swarming around their queen, Ben's students are oblivious to the corruption corroding their social justice cause (Ben's purchase of a late model BMW is just the tip of the iceberg). With Tony "Tell It Like It Is" Carvelli and Maddy "Secret Weapon" Rivers hot on their tails, the kids are bound to get caught. And someone's bound to get hurt-or worse.
Ever wry and cunning, author Dennis Carstens pulls no punches here. And series fans will revel in Tony Carvelli and Maddy Rivers' basking in the spotlight-a comeback of one of the private investigator genre's most satisfying dynamic duos.
For readers who like their legal thrillers politically-astute and to the point, like fans of Brad Thor. Fans of courtroom drama series by John Grisham, Richard North Patterson, John Ellsworth, and Scott Pratt will be in heaven.
