Joe Sargenti is a stressed-out corporate litigator and partner at white-shoe firm King and Ransom. Joe’s work consumes his life; he’s burned out, despises his colleagues, and regrets missed family time and broken relationships. He’s also shocked and saddened by the suicide of Marco Casasanta, a young colleague who was house counsel at one of the firm’s top clients, Madison Bank. One day, while looking into bank records regarding a seemingly routine SEC matter, he notices some unusual activity. Marco’s widow then asks Joe for help unlocking Marco’s laptop, hoping it might hold a clue to Marco’s suicide. Joe takes the laptop to his estranged son Sean, a feckless MIT computer science dropout, despite knowing that accessing any bank data it might contain is a serious legal matter. But Joe’s misgivings won’t go away, especially after he discovers that someone has deleted the suspicious records he’d seen, and then he’s abruptly shifted to another case. Soon the bank’s executives are demanding the laptop back. Joe stalls, and the bank retaliates with a court order against him, his son, and Marco’s widow. At this point, it’s safe to say that it’s not only Joe’s career that’s in jeopardy. Threatened with losing it all, will he get a chance to rebuild his relationship with Sean and ultimately find new purpose? Woll, a screenwriter and former lawyer, builds the story layer by painstaking layer in a voice laced with sardonic humor, as in his description of a bank executive: “His confidence in these abilities exceeded the abilities themselves.” While Joe stumbles across clues without knowing where they lead, the author raises the stakes with the behind-the-scenes dealings of high-level politicians. The main characters are well developed, while others such as the conniving partners and irascible elderly judge are familiar genre staples, though vividly sketched.
