An Insignificant Case

June 1, 2024

Bestselling Margolin (Gone But Not Forgotten) offers a stand-alone legal thriller. Charlie Webb, a two-bit lawyer, is appointed to represent an artist/burglar who has stolen, among other things, a USB drive filled with deadly secrets. As the bodies pile up, Webb is in the thick of it but trying to get out. With a 75K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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September 9, 2024
Margolin (Betrayal) delivers a far-fetched legal thriller about an Oregon attorney who gets tangled up in an ever more ominous web of organized crime. Charlie Webb has led an undistinguished career after graduating from a third-rate law school. Things change when restaurant owner Gretchen Hall and her associate, Yuri Makarov, are found murdered in a park near downtown Portland, with a painting partially covering Gretchen’s corpse. The artist, Guido Sabatini, is arrested for the killings, because he’d recently broken into Gretchen’s restaurant to steal back his painting and, in the process, ended up with a flash drive full of evidence that she and Yuri were sex trafficking young girls. Guido hires Charlie to defend him, thrusting the lawyer into his first high-stakes case. As Charlie fights to keep Guido free, he learns that some of the Pacific Northwest’s most powerful people belonged to Gretchen’s sex trafficking ring, and they’ll stop at nothing to keep their secrets hidden. What begins as a captivating, noir-tinted tale grows increasingly absurd as the twists stack up, culminating in a dreary conclusion sure to make readers groan. This squanders its potential.

Starred review from October 1, 2024
After seven books in the Robin Lockwood series, perhaps Margolin was in the mood for something different, or perhaps he found a story that wouldn't work as a Lockwood novel. At any rate, this stand-alone legal thriller is terrific. It features a mediocre lawyer, Charlie Webb, who specializes in mediocre cases, mostly involving people from his, shall we say, undistinguished past. When Charlie, acting as a court-appointed attorney, takes on the case of an artist who's been arrested for stealing a painting (his own--it's complicated), he doesn't anticipate the sort of dark dealings he's going to uncover, and he certainly doesn't expect that this will be the case that will change his life. In many ways this book is a blast from the past: Margolin, a criminal defense attorney, got his literary start in the 1990s writing compelling, memorable legal thrillers (his first two novels were Gone, but Not Forgotten and After Dark). This reads a lot like those early works. He might not be as well-known as John Grisham, but Margolin is just as talented a storyteller, and this winning novel showcases his gifts for plotting and character design.

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October 15, 2024
After an unusually bumpy ride, an unprepossessing Portland lawyer comes into his own. Charlie Webb was a mediocre student who graduated from a third-tier law school and now runs a modest practice. He's exactly the sort of nothing-burger attorney you'd expect the court to appoint to represent Lawrence Weiss, who calls himself Guido Sabatini and tells everyone he's the reincarnation of an Italian Renaissance painter. Weiss/Sabatini has been arrested after breaking into Gretchen Hall's restaurant, La Bella Roma, to steal back the painting he sold her for $500 because he's incensed to hear that it's stashed away in her office instead of hanging in the dining room for everyone to enjoy. Charlie quickly negotiates a deal that will set his client free if he returns the painting. But the case is more complicated than he realizes, for in addition to reclaiming his painting, Weiss, or Sabatini, also opened Gretchen's safe and helped himself to a thumb drive he thought might be interesting. Since the drive turns out to contain information that links Gretchen to a dastardly series of crimes, the stakes of this insignificant case rise exponentially. And that's all before a shooting that will force a very unwilling Charlie to defend his first client, who's now charged with murder. Margolin deals out the complications as deftly as a card shark, and if the revelation of the actual culprit, whose identity is the least surprising feature of the story, seems to come unduly early, don't worry: He has plenty more tricks up his sleeve. An inventive legal thriller that manages to spend remarkably little time in the courtroom.

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