EVERYTHING IS JAKE

Prolific lawyer and retired law professor Lieberman’s first solo novel is a whimsical tale of a secret plot to make seriously bad guys incriminate themselves.

Throughout his long and storied criminal career, Romo Malbonum, the Deckled Don, has never had to answer any legal charges. But one day, FBI agent Dewey Sisal tells Assistant U.S. Attorney Mallory Greenstock, the Don approached him and said he wanted to confess in court to a litany of crimes. In order to ensure that everything’s aboveboard, Malbonum will be represented by the illustrious Jedidiah Cardsworth Tillinghast, one-time college roommate of the presiding judge, Horton Pickscreed, and the confession will be captured on video. The only condition is that the proceedings must be wrapped up by this coming Friday. Mallory rubs her eyes, asks a few skeptical questions, and agrees, and Malbonum appears on schedule and confesses for hours as Judge Pickscreed looks on in growing bewilderment. Weird? Absolutely. But not nearly as weird as the moment days later when Malbonum, now that he’s been duly recorded, sentenced, and imprisoned, maintains that the whole confession was a hoax because whoever made it wasn’t him, despite oodles of evidence that it was. Troubled and baffled, Mallory calls on her old acquaintance and consulting detective T.R. Softly to get to the bottom of the mystery, and within days, Softly has discovered that this entire spectacle has been a mere curtain raiser to a deep-laid plot against President Mark Malleycorn Pohtiss, an intemperate crackpot whose public pronouncements, reprinted at length, are so demented and fact-free that the FBI’s code name for him is Fruitcake.

A broad, sweetly fantastical satire just perfect for readers in the mood.