Helpful Score: 2
I love courtroom dramas and David and Goliath scenarios (with me rooting for David) and this book has both as a will is contested for control of one of the largest banks in the world. A young lawyer is thrown into a pitched battle in a billion dollar battle against a seasoned lawyer for the spoiled and totally unlikeable kids of the deceased, while some dirty shenanigans are going on in the background. The money involved is serious enough to make things very dangerous.
Helpful Score: 2
A fast paced legal thriller about a promising lawyer at a powerhouse firm who falls for his secretive young client as she struggles to claim her recently deceased husbands huge fortune.
Helpful Score: 1
Get ready for a long night.........this is a page turner!
great legal thriller!
This courtroom suspense, published posthumously, is the fifteenth novel by Coughlin, a former federal judge. Here Jake Martin, a probate attorney in a make-or-break race for partnership in a prestigious Detroit firm, starts as part of a team handling the estate of banking tycoon Augustus Daren. Daren's last will and testament favor his fourth wife, the sexy, 20-years-younger Elizabeth. The bank's president, Daren's millionaire children, and someone in Jake's firm don't want Elizabeth running things and contest the will based on an incompetency argument. Through twists of fate (maybe), Jake finds himself in a litigation situation for the first time, up against a mercenary defense attorney known in the press as the "Tiger." Oh, yeah, through all this Jake's heartless attorney-wife is suing for divorce, his partner-rival Cora is asking him on dates, and Elizabeth is wearing slinky black dresses to dinner. Coughlin's forte is characterization, which carries the reader's interest, for while the plot is well constructed, Coughlin lets the audience in on too much for anything to be terribly surprising. The verdict, by the way, is left to the jury, but readers won't be disappointed.
Elizabeth Daren has evidence missing and key witnesses changing their stories, but the battle for her dead husband's fortune is turning ugly.
Someone is out to get her, and only one of the country's shrewdest, most battle-hardended lawyers can save her. If he can trust her.
Someone is out to get her, and only one of the country's shrewdest, most battle-hardended lawyers can save her. If he can trust her.
The prize of Billions of dollars held by one of America's most powerful banks and the chance to dominate the entire financial world. The battleground is the sumptuous backrooms of the ultra-rich and the big league law firms that take no prisoners. The players are a beautiful widow bound to her enemiesby a contested will, greed and lust and the lawyer to takes the greatest gamble of all.
