Elusive Wisdom

Having suffered the first trial loss of his career, Daniel Dermot O'Neil, a San Francisco civil trial lawyer, licks his wounds. Three years later, the foreperson on that case is murdered in rural Mississippi, leaving behind an envelope with O'Neil's name and address. In it are copies of many canceled checks made out to the deceased for large sums, and a small, black and white photograph that provides a compelling clue as to the reason for the checks, if not the murder. O'Neil is enlisted by the Mississippi Attorney General to help solve the murder, which may also be connected to other Mississippi murders.Although highly improbable, the evidence mounts that the murder victim was bribed for her vote in the Pavlone case. A relentless and dangerous pursuit of answers follows a path of murdered suspects and eventually leads to an enigmatic supposed 'insurance adjuster' who shows up in high stakes cases where catastrophic injuries are caused by defectively designed products.The pursuit of answers and of justice takes O'Neil around the country and into the arms of a brilliant, beautiful woman of diverse ancestry - a woman he cannot relinquish. Ultimately, he must let his lifelong friend, Joe Cleary, actually try the civil case that extracts the fortunes and the licenses of the principal players who had managed to escape criminal prosecution.
About the Author: Joe McCray is seventy years old. Some might think this is an age where one really shouldn't be launching a writing career. But maybe it's a better time. His has been a long life - a long, eventful, and revealing life. Maybe others could have come across what he did without living it, but, if that is so, there seems to be a value in actually doing it His most important years were spent in San Francisco - forty of them. The center of those years was his thirty-two years as a practicing trial lawyer, beginning April Fool's Day, 1971, and ending in January of 2005. It was on the latter date that the California State Bar placed him on "inactive" status. At that point, he and his wife returned to the Portland, Oregon, area, where they had attended high school. There, they took over a failing little farm and took to raising two Labrador pups. Finding farming very hard and hunting season short, he began to spend some time mulling over and writing about his practice as fiction. After all, being in San Francisco from 1965 until 2005 was like trying to enjoy a good bottle of wine and some pasta in the middle of a battlefield.