Legal Thrillers

His latest installment, Eye of the Beholder, does indeed feature a lawyer, one Paul Riley, an attorney who made his name convicting a killer of six college coeds on a deserted campus in 1989. Fast forward to the present, and Riley is starting to get some of the same creepy notes he was getting when he was prosecuting the case, and there are starting to be what look like either copycat crimes, or the crimes of someone who was really responsible the first time around. When Paul had attended the execution of the confessed killer, the killer had mouthed the words, "I'm not the only one", and the words are starting to feel to Paul like gospel truth.

The creepiness of the crimes are not underplayed by the usually merely suspenseful Ellis - they are genuinely horrifying, along the lines of a Jeffrey Deaver or Karin Slaughter book (though not quite as graphic). The girls were all killed in different, horrible ways; two of the victims were college co-eds and the other four were prostitutes. One of them, Cassie Bentley, was the daughter of a very wealthy college benefactor (think Paris Hilton scale and notoriety) and so got special treatment during the original investigation. The killer wasn't prosecuted for her death, mostly so that nothing unsavory would be revealed publically about Cassie herself. Because the case had been such a slam dunk in every other way, and because Paul had been such a very young prosecutor at the time, he had gone along with the strong suggestion of his superiors to run the case that way. Fifteen years later, Harland Bentley, Cassie's father, is Paul's biggest client. And now Paul isn't certain that his daughter's killer was actually ever found.

When circumstances begin to ratchet up and Paul looks to be set up not as an attorney but as a perpetrator, he begins to investigate on his own, something that leads him deep into the dynamics of Harland's family and further into the mind of another sociopath. One of my least favorite mystery tropes is when the main character is framed as a suspect - though of course it's a perfect plot device - but Ellis thankfully doesn't take it too far, and for me, that only increased the suspense of the story and my interest in the outcome. This smart thriller takes you places you weren't sure you were going in the beginning, and if it's a bit more violent than the usual Ellis fare, it's so well put together and paced that the sometime goriness of the plot isn't a deterrent but an accelerant. This is a terrific novel by a wonderful writer.