Book Description

A Chicago lawyer must save his big-city friends from small-town corruption in this “triumphantly rowdy” mystery (Time) that’s also “exciting [and] hard as nails” (The New Yorker). When club owner Jake Justus and his wife, Helene, flee a sweltering Chicago summer for rural Jackson County, Wisconsin, they expect sweet-as-apple-pie locals and calm lakes for fishing. Instead, they become the bait: When the town’s two-term senator is shot to death, Jake and Helene are held as material witnesses—and, if the fathead sheriff has anything to say about it, suspects. Attorney John J. Malone comes to help out his friends, but in a town where everybody knows everybody—be it by blood, sex, or church socials—only out-of-town strangers are fit to be accused. Oh yeah? So what’s their motive for the second murder? Or the third? And the fourth? To find out, Malone will turn Jackson County upside down—with pleasure—and give it a good shake. It might be easier than finding a decent bar! “The Dorothy Parker of detective fiction” is back with the unbeatable trio of sharp-witted attorney John J. Malone and snarky high-society couple Jake and Helene (William Ruehlmann). Trial by Fury is the 5th book in the John J. Malone Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.