Eleven-year old Mark Sway and his younger brother, Ricky, sneak out into the woods and stumble upon a distraught attorney about to commit suicide. Mark tries to stop the man covertly by pulling out a hose from the exhaust and it only enrages the man, causing him to force young Mark into the car at gunpoint. It's then that the attorney tells Mark what makes him want to kill himself: his mob client told him where he buried the body of a murdered senator.

That single question--where is the body--leads the reader through a sometimes poignant, often interesting and engaging tale of a young boy (wiser than his years at times) and his spirited, driven female attorney, Reggie Love (great name!) doing legal battle and practicing some minor evasion tactics. The question is whether the feds can force young Mark into telling what he knows. Does he really know where the body is located? If Mark does know, then he puts his family at risk from the mafia bad guy known as Barry The Blade.

Those who enjoy reading child-in-danger drama with a little bit of courtroom drama.

The strength of this book is in the way attorney Reggie Love literally takes Mark under her wing and seeks to protect him in a very motherly and unusually non-attorney-like way. I found Reggie's lawyer character to have good dimension, digging into her history and background at just the right moments to lift her off the page.

The Blade is somewhat dull and characterless as a bad guy and where I hoped he might prove to be more menacing as the story went on, never really materialized. Just giving a villain a tough name with a cutthroat occupation doesn't make him/her a bada$$ to be feared.

Those looking for a lengthy drama read, something family-friendly, somewhat legal fiction (this could almost be a children's book, certainly YA fiction, if not for the suicide angle) will find a lot to enjoy reading here.

7,304 Kindle locations. Approximately 496 pages.

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Created Aug 12, 2013 at 8:13pm • Submit your own review...