LAST LAWYER STANDING

Honolulu attorney Kevin Corvelli’s latest pair of clients serve up surprise after unhappy surprise.

Kevin has represented career criminal Turi Ahina, who once saved his life, so many times that he should award him frequent-client miles. So nothing could be more routine than the news that the cops have busted Turi in his meth lab. Threatening him with serious time, Assistant U.S. Attorneys William F. Boyd and Audra Levy demand that Turi earn his Get–Out-of-Jail-Free card by infiltrating the inner circle of legendary drug lord Orlando Masonet, whom neither Turi nor anybody else ever seems to have met. Then Turi’s arrested for shooting Detective Kanoa Bristol, and Kevin decides that his best defense is to argue that Bristol and virtually the entire Honolulu PD were on the take. As if all these complications aren’t enough, Kevin’s landed a second assignment that’s anything but routine from the get-go: to make sure that Governor Wade Omphrey never even goes on trial for the strychnine poisoning of Oksana Sutin, his Russian mistress. The governor has a cast-iron alibi for the time of her death, so Kevin’s job is limited to convincing the cops—the same cops he plans to identify as crooks—that Omphrey didn’t hire world-class hit man Lok Sun, recently spotted in the Aloha state, or anyone else to administer the fatal dose and, of course, to manage the press coverage leading up to the election. Keeping both the wisecracks and the satyriasis he showed in Night on Fire (2011, etc.) under relative control, Kevin makes only one new conquest, his opposite number Audra Levy, but still finds plenty to keep him busy inside and outside of the courtroom.

More lawyers, law enforcement types, Class-A felonies and plot twists than you can shake a stick at. Instead of a map, Corleone should have supplied a score card.