THE EDGE OF GUILT might better be called the swamp or morass of guilt...but guilt there is

THE EDGE OF GUILT
DAVID MIRALDI
Kindle edition (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Heather was only fifteen when she died by suicide.
Her father wants justice.
The system wants silence.

After his daughter’s tragic death, Dennis is devastated, convinced that her psychiatrist is to blame. Desperate for accountability, he seeks an attorney to settle the score.

Enter Paul Schofield, a struggling attorney who impulsively takes the case, hoping for a quick settlement. But the deeper he digs, the more he uncovers buried secrets, conflicting loyalties, and ethical dilemmas that shake him to his core. As courtroom tensions rise, relationships fracture, alliances shift, and the line between justice and greed begins to blur.

Inspired by true events, The Edge of Guilt is a gripping legal drama that delves into the gray areas of justice, morality, and grief—captivating readers from the first page and resonating long after the final verdict.

Perfect for fans of Defending Jacob by William Landay, Reversible Errors by Scott Turow, and Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, this story blends courtroom suspense with emotional depth and real-world ethical complexity.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Legal dramas don't come much more grabby than a grieving father trying to wrap his head around his child's death. Failing that, he sets out to get revenge, or as he thinks of it, "Justice."

The big issue is an Eternal Verity: NEVER START A LAWSUIT IF YOU'RE GUILTY. Of what, well, look at Oscar Wilde if you just want a case study of why this is the world's worst idea. The author's a civil lawyer, so no doubt accustomed to lying clients. I'm not all the way convinced that isn't why there's a twist at the latter stages of the story...was that really a good idea is not settled in my mind.

The real characters here are the lawyer and the father. They eat all our attention, seemingly by design as there aren't any female characters including the dead daughter who speak much still less say anything important.

I won't say it was my favorite read of May 2025 but I never rolled my eyes and resisted picking it up. The comps above seem accurate to me. I liked the Landay book pretty much exactly the same intensity as I liked this one, and for similar reasons of moral complexity. If you like courtroom dramas, this definitely makes its bones there; if you're after a solid tale of grief managed poorly, here you go; if you like a surprise ending, the kettle's on in Author Miraldi's story kitchen.

DARD NOIR: CRUSH; BIRD IN A CAGE; THE WICKED GO TO HELL; all 4-plus star Pushkin Vertigo French thriller translations

THE WICKED GO TO HELL
FRÉDÉRIC DARD
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An undercover cop and a prison inmate play a tense game of cat and mouse in this brilliantly original thriller by the master of French noir

At one of France’s toughest prisons, an undercover cop is attempting to trap an enemy spy by posing as a fellow inmate. So Frank and Hal find themselves holed up together in a grimy, rat-infested cell, each warily eyeing the other. As they plan a daring escape, an unexpected friendship ensues—but which is the cop and which is the spy?

Gritty and hard-hitting, The Wicked Go to Hell is a tense, paranoid 1950s thriller about duty and conscience, deception and loyalty, and about what it means to be human—whether you’re the good guy or not.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Have you finished your Simenon shelf(s)? Are you tired of searching out Pascal Garnier books you haven't read? Pick up the scent of Frédéric Dard, the perpetrator of similar romans durs and noir-themed explorations of the human condition.

In this Jim Thompsonesque tale of convicted murderers who escape incarceration and, while on the run, develop a deeper regard for each other than they have for themselves. It's too short for me to say too much more, but the men are very much of a type that noir readers love to read about: Down on their luck men, violent and angry, who act out their lifelong received abuse all around them. They're very much victims of a system that cares nothing for or about them until they step out of line. Like Genet's homosexual versions, they're perpetrators of crime who see no wrong in getting what they need by any means necessary because absolutely no one anywhere will give it to them.

The twist ending is...foreshadowed a wee bit too strongly in the prologue. Maybe read that after you've finished the book. It won't take you much more than a long, cold Sunday afternoon to read, and it is as perfect a #Deathtober seasonal read as any I've found.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


CRUSH
FRÉDÉRIC DARD
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A slow-burning intelligent thriller with a wicked twist in the tail from one of the giants of French noir fiction

Bored with her mundane factory job, her nagging mother and her alcoholic father-in-law, Louise is captivated by a glamorous American couple who move to her industrial hometown in Northern France. The Roolands' home is an island of colour, good humour and easy living in drab 1950s Léopoldville, and soon Louise is working there as a maid. But once she is under her new employers' roof their model life starts to fall apart—painful secrets from their past emerge, cracks in their relationship appear and a dark obsession begins to grow, which will end in murder...

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Another long-afternoon read that feels so very French, and not the glamourous edge of Frenchness. We as foreigners probably don't think much about the huge bulk of France, a country that's close to the Netherlands on the north all the way to the Mediterranean in the south. It's about the size of Texas, for US readers, so very, very big and diverse.

This story takes place in the cold, rainy north, in a town of working-class folk...think Rust Belt/Great Lakes, US readers...being "invaded" by people who work for NATO, so are both foreign and educated. It's culture shock all around. This is always a chance for the chancers to move their station up...Louise, our narrator, is one who sees her chance to leave the boring beautyless trudge of her preordained life behind.

As always, the plan goes to hell once it connects with reality.

Louise is an unreliable narrator...you'll figure that out before page ten...and very much the manipulative minx. Her life was never going to be easy, but whose is? Does the twist at the end mean what its surface says it does?

You know by now Dard doesn't do wrapping-paper-and-bow endings. Go with him, pay attention to every word, and enjoy the places you'll go.

After all, you have the luxury of leaving them.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


BIRD IN A CAGE
FRÉDÉRIC DARD
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: It felt like the slipknot on a rope round my chest was being tightened without pity

Trouble is the last thing Albert needs. Travelling back to his childhood home on Christmas Eve to mourn his mother’s death, he finds the loneliness and nostalgia of his Parisian quartier unbearable… Until, that evening, he encounters a beautiful, seemingly innocent woman at a brasserie, and his spirits are lifted.

Still, something about the woman disturbs him. Where is the father of her child? And what are those two red stains on her sleeve? When she invites him back to her apartment, Albert thinks he’s in luck. But a monstrous scene awaits them, and he finds himself lured into the darkness against his better judgment.

Unravelling like a paranoid nightmare, Bird in a Cage melds existentialist drama with thrilling noir to tell the story of a man trapped in a prison of his own making.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Stupid decisions go hand-in-hand with horniness. Women want me, thinks the little head; men want me, thinks the woman's head, and they'll do whatever I want in hopes I'll deliver the goodies. Spoiler alert: fat chance she'll live up to her side of the bargain.

When did you last see Double Indemity? This is a careful take on that story in a French accent. I think of that statement as a compliment...if you decide to emulate something, do it carefully and well, so it raises the same admiring attention as the emulated thing. The "reasoning" behind Albert, the man in question, doing what he did is...poor. Suffice to say the crime he's involved in wouldn't've challenged Maigret, or any flic in 1961 France, too awfully much.

That said, even a good copy is a copy. So I stalled out at four stars.

IRREPARABLE HARM, in which a corporate attorney rediscovers her soul

IRREPARABLE HARM
MELISSA F. MILLER (Sasha McCandless Thrillers #1)
Brown Street Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
Free on Kindle!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: There's an app for everything. Even evil.

Attorney Sasha McCandless is closing in on the prize after eight long years: she's months away from being made partner at a prestigious law firm. All she has to do is keep her head down and her billable hours up.

Then a plane operated by her client slams into the side of a mountain, killing everyone aboard. Sasha gears up to prepare a defense to the inevitable civil lawsuits.

She quickly realizes the crash was no accident: a developer has created an application that can control a commercial plane's onboard computer from a smartphone. Now it's for sale to the highest bidder.

Sasha joins forces with a federal air marshal who's investigating the crash. As they race to prevent another airline disaster, people close to the matter start turning up dead. Sasha must rely on both her legal skills and her Krav Maga training to stop the madman before he kills her.

Sasha will need to rely on her legal training and her Krav Maga training in equal measure to find and stop a madman before he strikes again.

My Review: If you'd like to see how far Amazon has to go with its integration of Kindle highlighting into it title quotations, go look at this. Yikes.

Anyway, lookee here at me writing a review! And of a book I read on the Kindle, where if I'm lucky I get around half of what's going on! And follow that link to see just one of my mechanical issues with the Kindle as a note-taking device...I left three notes myownself, all carefully done, and they're only visible to people who bother to read them. Mine make sense, I promise, and I didn't leave dangly bits of sentences or anything. Why aren't they in the quotes? I could not tell you.

But back to why I'm reviewing a Kindle thriller: I think you should read it. I was engaged all the way through, even the parts where Author Miller walks me through the steps of a krav maga attack/defense, which she did several times when once would've been enough. Better yet, most of the time I was excited. Me! The cynical old "and how many times have I read *that* trope?" pursey-lipped nay-sayer! Excited! As in "can't you go up to the dining room for dinner, I'm reading" excited!

Why, you ask...and I'm glad you did because I was fixin' to tell y'all anyway...because Author Miller is a lawyer, and it shows, who *gets* that a legal case is a story with multiple main characters, a built-in motive for a crime, a cast of necessary characters already in place, and a plethora of available outcomes from one established set of facts.

Which is my attempt at tweaking her lawyerly nose with a dryly legalish presentation of the compliment that she followed the winding maze of legal hoo-hah without being predictable or, as I prefer to think of it, lazy. Writers who set the pattern for themselves and then just follow it write well-plotted but often...uninspiring...stories. It feels to me as though Melissa Miller tried to do that but was foiled in her attempt by the stroppiness of both Sasha and Naya, and the exasperated admiration of Judge Cook for Sasha was also (I suspect) a little bit of a surprise to Author Miller. I got the feeling Leo needed to catch up with Sasha a time or two when he was led by the outline to expect her *here* but she was *there*. These are good things. They show me the story was alive when it was published.

The parts of the story that left me the most contented were the usual suspects in a series mystery: ma'at is served, the bad are punished in a manner both swift and condign, and the events of the story leave the landscape intact but altered. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first book published by Author Miller. It is the first in her series of ten thrillers starring Sasha.

And I suggest you think before you buy: The other titles are $4.99 each. You'll want them. I do, and am choosing which pennies to pinch so as to procure them next month.

DEFENDING JACOB, routine courtroom drama redeemed by a wallopin' good ending; Posted 6 April 2013

DEFENDING JACOB
WILLIAM LANDAY
Bantam Books
$17.00 trade paper, $12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney in his suburban Massachusetts county for more than twenty years. He is respected in his community, tenacious in the courtroom, and happy at home with his wife, Laurie, and son, Jacob. But when a shocking crime shatters their New England town, Andy is blindsided by what happens next: His fourteen-year-old son is charged with the murder of a fellow student.

Every parental instinct Andy has rallies to protect his boy. Jacob insists that he is innocent, and Andy believes him. Andy must. He’s his father. But as damning facts and shocking revelations surface, as a marriage threatens to crumble and the trial intensifies, as the crisis reveals how little a father knows about his son, Andy will face a trial of his own—between loyalty and justice, between truth and allegation, between a past he’s tried to bury and a future he cannot conceive.

Award-winning author William Landay has written the consummate novel of an embattled family in crisis—a suspenseful, character-driven mystery that is also a spellbinding tale of guilt, betrayal, and the terrifying speed at which our lives can spin out of control.

My Review: Courtroom legal thriller. Nothing new there.

Redeemed from two-star basement by two things: The ending, which I am surprised to say I didn't see coming. It was a gut-punch.

And also two quotes, things I closed the book and nodded sagely after reading, things that were So Well Said I had to take a pause for absorption:

It was as if there was a place called After, and if I could just push my family across to that shore, then everything would be all right. There would be time for all these "soft" problems in the land of After.

Yes, yes, anyone who has ever lived through A Tragedy knows this feeling intimately, knows how this sentence encapsulates the aching need to be normal and better and fixed...that never comes....

And this:

At some point as adults we we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead.

Anyone who has read some of my more dyspeptic posts on Facebook will realize how little I think of the adolescent exceptionalism that pervades our adult culture. You don't have a *right* to own a gun, unless you're in a "well-regulated militia," you have a stupid-ass paranoid fear that results from imaging They are out to get you. It's a symptom of a brand of stupid arrogant vanity, a sense of self as Uniquely Valuable, that is ridiculous and borderline mentally ill.

No one is so damned important that They are Out To Get You. And that sentence, that piece of Landay's wisdom, explains why it should be okay to say "Oh just STFU and grow up!" to more people more often.

Anyway. Up from a rocklike two all the way to three and a quarter stars. An enjoyable read redeemed by surprise and wisdom...helluva job, Landay!

2020 UPDATE FOUR TV-SERIES STARS Chris Evans plays Andy Barber with a complexity and focus that made me invest even more heavily in the AppleTV+ adaptation than I had in the book (as the ending approached). I like Mr. Evans's style of acting in general, but he sets the knobs to 11 and then wraps every-damn-thing in lead shielding as Andy's universe shreds...and then there's the slightly altered ending, which was pretty big stuff for Evans to play.

Still, eight episodes was two too many in my estimation, leading Michelle Dockery's performance as Laurie Barber to wear thin. It's hard to watch her reach deeper and deeper into herself and come back with much the same intensity...nonetheless, anything mildly critical I say shouldn't keep you from signing up for the free trial, binging the series, then canceling. Whatever you do, don't give those sleazebags any more of your money than is impossible to avoid.