HOSTILE WITNESS

Debut thriller about a Philadelphia lawyer tired of being behind on his charge cards who agrees to join the defense team for an embattled city councilman and his aide—and then watches his slick new buddies sell him down the river. The feds have a tape of impassioned anti-drug councilman Jimmy Moore trying to shake down ballplayer-turned-restauranteur Zack Bissonette. They plan to rush Moore and his aide, Chester Concannon, to trial even before Bissonette dies from a professionally administered beating and his club is torched. Moore's defense is headed by blue-blooded William Prescott III, but Prescott needs a lawyer outside his firm to take the fall along with Concannon, and the call goes to Victor Carl, who jumps on the case—even though he's sure that Prescott means to defend Moore by feeding Concannon to the wolves—because he's so desperate for big money and success and the hot-sheets favors of Moore's drugged-out mistress Veronica Ashland. The defense, however, is a nightmare. Prescott bids Victor sit as mute as a crash-test dummy, and a cowed Concannon concurs. Convinced that Bissonette was killed because of the mysterious last woman in his athletic life, Victor calls on a burlesque Othodox Jewish shamus, borrowed from another, equally ignominious case, to review the evidence. But his spasmodic investigations just get him into deeper trouble with Prescott, Moore, the Citizens for a United Philadelphia, a scary drug-dealer, some serious mobsters—and then, finally, Veronica, whose apartment he drags himself to one last time to subpoena her as a hostile witness who is Concannon's only hope for vindication. Lashner, writing with a first- novelist's fearless grasp of clichÇs, still has a few surprises up his sleeve, and although Victor is a loser even so, it's not at all in the way he expected. Grisham fans will love the lawyer-baiting and righteous self-disgust, which will evidently continue indefinitely in a promised series. (First printing of 75,000; $150,000 ad/promo; author tour)