Ed McBain: The Last Best Hope

From the Publisher:
The pretty lady sitting in attorney Matthew Hope's Calusa, Florida, office has legs long enough to stretch to Honolulu and blue eyes set wide in a beautiful face. Jill Lawton wants Hope to find her husband, Jack. Her tale is commonplace: a middle-aged husband goes north to look for work, finds another woman, doesn't come back. The embittered wife wants out-with alimony. It's the kind of manhunt Hope's associates Chambers, Kiley, & Lamb can normally handle with their private eyes closed.

But that is before a corpse turns up on a Calusa beach with Jack Lawton's ID in his pocket. Hope should have remembered the first axiom of being a criminal lawyer: the client always hides something...such as the kinky, sizzling sex life this Jack and Jill preferred. Instead Hope asks for help from cops up north where Jack Lawton was last seen, and starts snooping around the Sunshine State himself. Here some slimy critters hide in the deep eddies and local watering holes. And here Hope, shaky from the gunshot wounds he barely survived, suddenly has second thoughts about tangling with them.

For Matthew Hope, the Lawton case signals a sea change in his life, an ending of relationships, a shift in values, and a look into the dark night of his own soul. And for every reader of Ed McBain's work, The Last Best Hope has characters that will give them a thrill-as well as a complex, riveting plot that delivers one helluva knock-out surprise.

Ed McBain: The Last Best Hope. Warner Books, ISBN: 0446606731 (January, 1999), $7.50