“Listen to me, Michael. There’s not a client in this world that’s worth your getting killed. Or even slightly maimed. You start being a lawyer and stop playing the Green Hornet.”

“Playing what?”

“Never mind. I forget you’re an adolescent. You know what I’m saying.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (APR 18, 2010)

Michael Knight may be too young to remember the Green Hornet, but this junior partner in the Devlin and Knight law firm spends a lot more time in Frame Up risking his life than he does cross-examining witnesses in a courtroom. In fact, his first act in Chapter One is to struggle back to consciousness to the voice of his anxious father-figure senior partner, Lex Devlin. Mr. Devlin, as Michael always calls him, tells the younger man he’s in Mass General Hospital and is “a roadmap of lacerations around the face.” Michael was wounded when a car he was walking toward exploded and he was “hit with something that felt like the defensive front line of the New York Patriots.” But it isn’t Michael’s injuries that pain him the most. Inside that car had been his best friend, John McKedrick.

Only a few days later Michael is up and around and attending John’s funeral. Also there is Benny Ignola, “legal counsel to the lower-to-middle-level Mafia” in Boston and the guy for whom John, also an attorney, had been working. Michael had been urging John to break away from his underworld ties, and recently he’d thought his friend might actually do it. Benny knows Michael and Lex Devlin steer a wide berth around mob work, but he nevertheless cryptically insists that he and Michael will need to talk.

Ignola is small organized crime potatoes, and someone Michael thinks he can ignore. But there are others who can’t be so easily dismissed: Michael soon gets the dubious “honor” of meeting powerful godfather Dominic Santangelo who, forty years ago, was like a brother to Lex Devlin and then-fighter-now-Catholic-priest Matt Ryan. Monsignor Ryan gathers them together again because Santangelo’s son has been arrested for John McKedrick’s car bomb murder. The old mob boss has no doubt in the world that his son, who has deliberately stayed out of his father’s business, is innocent. With the possibility that someone in his own organization has turned on him, Santangelo needs someone he can trust to represent his son.

Naturally, Santangelo’s request is one neither Mr. Devlin nor Michael want to touch with a ten-foot pole. However, the priest helps them see a slim chance of working good from all this, so reluctantly they take the case. It falls to Michael to start putting together the pieces of how the Santangelo kid, Peter, and his friend John are connected. Pretty soon, Michael is playing a life and death game with very ruthless people. And he does play games, gadding about setting up high-risk stings, trying to play off one international mob boss against others. Somehow, he and others in his vicinity (including a young woman whom he is trying to date) nearly meet their Maker on more than one occasion, and even though Mr. Devlin orders him to stop taking such foolhardy chances, Michael can’t cease his determination to play every deadly hand.

Coincidentally, John F. Dobbyn’s Frame Up happens to share some plot ideas with David Hosp’s Among Thieves. Now I don’t know about you, but my first choice for a legal thriller set in Boston and rife with Mafia figures would probably not revolve around art works stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. But these two authors did make that choice. Hosp directly links his story to the real, still unsolved theft of paintings worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He even involves real mobster James “Whitey” Bulger * in his version of events. Dobbyn is more round-about; he doesn’t mention the Gardner Museum by name, and he merely describes one of the missing paintings. But in both novels, members of the mob have gotten themselves in deep you-know-what by trying to make windfall profits from either the original works or their counterfeits. In both books, merciless killers from Europe are after smaller-scale con men or crooks who have allegedly defrauded them. And in both, decent lawyers find themselves nearly in over their heads as they try to defend clients somehow mixed up with the famous art work, and have to use their smarts to try to outwit their bloodthirsty opponents. In Michael’s case, this means working with Benny Ignola, a desperate art forger, and going to Amsterdam to find out what his friend, John, might have sequestered there, all the while dodging hit men and death traps.

Young Michael Knight is more of a crusader at heart than Hosp’s older, somewhat jaded Scott Finn. But, unlike Scott, jaunty Michael seems to think he has an endless supply of lives to dangle in front of the bad guys. Even though he gives lip-service to Mr. Devlin’s demand that he stop doing things that could kill him, he would rather take the chances than return to the office without justice for those he represents, those he loves, and those who would spit on justice if they could.

Frame-Up distinguishes itself as crime fiction with deeply Catholic men as its heroes (and some of its gangsters too). It features law partners who view the world as God’s creation where Man is responsible for his actions and where brotherhood, honor, love, and humanity all matter dearly. Retribution, and, more importantly, redemption, have not lost their meanings in this world either. This is a refreshingly straightforward moral framework that engenders respect for Devlin and Knight, just as they feel it for each other in their own father/son way. Although Michael’s ability to stay alive does stretch credibility (in the same way many thriller heroes’ actions do), he’s an attorney who’ll fight for what’s right even if he has to do it unconventionally. What more could one want?

*A note of interest: Just last month, a federal prosecutor pursuing this case said he didn’t think Bulger had anything to do with the crime.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Oceanview Publishing; 1 edition (March 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AMAZON PAGE:	Frame Up
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John F. Dobbyn
EXTRAS:	An interview with John F. Dobbyn
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Among Thieves by David Hosp

Bibliography:

• Neon Dragon (March 2007)
• Frame Up (March 2010)

“People have searched for these paintings for twenty years,” she said. “The police, the FBI, Interpol, private detectives, insurance detectives, art historians, treasure hunters. People have spent an enormous amount of energy trying to find these things, but no one has done it yet. There have been lots of theories about who was responsible. The most popular is that the IRA teamed up with the Boston mob to do the job, then split the take between the two groups.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (MAR 1, 2010)

Among Thieves opens its prologue with a man from Ireland named Liam about to finish off “a lump of flesh curled in front of him on the cement floor.” He had tortured “the lump” for information that he had not gotten. While looking down at the man, Murphy, Liam remembered how, when he was a child in Belfast, a vengeance killing left him the only survivor in his immediate family. This grisly event had put him on his current path of mayhem and murder.

Next, Boston attorney Scott Finn enters the Nashua Street Jail to visit Devon Malley, a guy he knew back in the day when he wasn’t such an upstanding citizen either. Devon is in the joint for what looks like a smash-and-grab at a very expensive clothing and lingerie store. But as Scott, his paralegal, Lissa Krantz, and his investigator, Tom Kozlowski, soon discover, defending Devon is no piece of cake. Not to mention this could well become a pro bono case that could end up costing much more than foregone greenbacks.

And then there is Devon’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Sally (yes, Sally Malley) who needs somewhere to stay while her old man’s in the slammer. Scott knows from personal experience what the foster care system is like and decides to let her stay in his spare room until her father’s bail hearing. Sally, who lived her early years with her druggie mother and had had to fend off some of the men her mom brought home, locks the guest room door just in case. She also puts up the expected teenage wall, and it is up to Scott, Lissa, and Tom to get her to come out from behind it.

Meanwhile, a team of Boston cops and an FBI agent work the case of cut-up-and-dead Murphy, a well-known member of the mob. Then they are called to another crime scene where four men have been shot to death and a fifth one’s body looks like a filleted fish. This second tortured lump is Eddie Ballick, an underworld boss, who would have preferred being a fisherman to a life of crime. Scott had gone to see Ballick about Devon the day before, hoping to get information that he might be able to trade to the prosecution on his client’s behalf about others involved in the store robbery. However, Ballick isn’t cooperative even though he and Scott knew each other way back. When Scott is asked by the police to come answer questions about Ballick’s murder, Scott stalls them. He first goes to the courthouse to try to get bail for Devon. He also tells Devon what happened to Ballick, and that totally changes Devon’s mind about wanting his freedom. He knows only too well he could be next on the vicious killer’s list.

Devon and Liam, as told in Among Thieves, were the two men who robbed the Gardner Museum back in March 1990, getting away with artwork now estimated at over half a billion dollars. And Liam is methodically working through the men most likely to know where the paintings are stashed. However, the Boston mobster at the top of that list is out of Liam’s reach because he’s been on the run for years. That man is Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger.

Bulger is a real person who has made appearances of sorts in various novels including Along Comes a Stranger, by Dorie McCullough Lawson. Whether he makes one in Among Thieves will remain for readers to discover. Whether he does or not, he is considered by this novel to have been one of the men behind the thefts at the Gardner Museum. As the introductory quote notes, the theory that U.S. organized crime partnered with the IRA to pull off this crime is a popular one, and Bulger headed the Boston crime world back then. Ulrich Boser’s The Gardner Heist, a 2008 examination of facts and theories about this unsolved armed robbery, mentions Bulger as a credible culprit, and the author became so engrossed in this possibility that he even traveled to Galway Bay, Ireland thinking he might track Bulger down there.

For Scott Finn and his associates, Liam — who clearly will stop at nothing get his hands on the paintings — is the primary problem, not Bulger. After Devon spills why he got himself arrested in the first place and why he doesn’t want to leave the jail, they realize defending him could also put their lives at grave risk. Without a means to getting at Devon directly, Liam might target one of them — or target Sally. And the prospect of dying like Murphy and Ballick strikes cold fear in the hearts of all the potential victims.

As the magnitude of their client’s criminal past dawns on them, Finn, Tom, and Lissa, in quite realistic and sometimes funny scenes, also become attached to Sally — and she, grudgingly, to them. I did too, which isn’t always the case when an author decides to make a rather unsocial teen into a major character. Anyway, by the time Sally might be sighted in Liam’s crosshairs, Hosp’s trio and readers like me actually want her to survive the novel and to perhaps turn fifteen in Scott Finn’s next adventure. Generally, these four characters are believable people for whom one gladly roots. The same can be said for the police partners, about whom Hosp provides some interesting back story.

David Hosp’s threesome of Finn, Krantz, and Kozlowski reminds me somewhat of Michael Connelly’s best-seller fictional defense attorney, Mikey Haller, and his own squad of associates. For example, Haller’s investigator, Dennis Wojchiechowski, and his assistant, Lorna Taylor, are an item, and this parallels the relationship of Tom and Lissa. While reading Among Thieves, I thought of Connelly’s The Brass Verdict a few times. Although their plots are not that similar, both Finn and Haller have to deal with less than forthcoming or cooperative clients and must mull over some serious legal ethics issues.

Finn and Haller also have in common that they each “star” in a book series. In Finn’s case, Dark Harbor and Innocence, have both been quite enthusiastically received by the public and critics.

Unlike Connelly, Hosp is an attorney. Whether this primary profession gives him a leg up or he simply has a knack for writing clear legal suspense, this novel is easily followed by readers without a legal background. Once though I thought Hosp had decided he was writing for fourth graders who hadn’t learned their fractions or percentages yet: “In her fifteen years on the detective squad, she’d cleared over seventy-five percent of her cases. That meant if a case was assigned to her, three out of four times someone was convicted of the crime.” And then, two sentences later, Hosp again turned math teacher. But that’s a minor quibble.

What really happened to the stolen Gardner art remains shrouded in mystery, but Among Thieves has done its homework regarding the facts that are available and the conjectures that have grown from those facts. The novel’s practically minute-by-minute scenario of how the heist might have gone down is entirely plausible. The trick for someone writing about this monumental, real unsolved art crime is devising a conclusion that supplies adequate resolution and yet doesn’t violate what the the real world knows to be true about the paintings. Hosp meets those requirements ingeniously. The climax of Hosp’s Among Thieves revs the drama and steps up the unpredictability.The tension mounts as Liam, Devon, Sally, our three musketeers, and the cops and feds all converge. Some of them won’t breathe much longer. All because a man who once knifed masterpieces from their frames desperately wants possession of them again.

Bookdom’s legal thriller genre isn’t a lonely place; Hosp’s series faces stiff competition. However, it can stand up to it and shoulder out pedestal space all its own.

Bibliography:

Scott Finn series

• Dark Harbor (June 2005)
• Innocence (July 2007)
• Among Thieves (January 2010)

Stand-alone:

• The Betrayed (July 2006)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 60 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grand Central Publishing; 1 edition (January 11, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Hosp
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Dark Harbor The Betrayed And other Boston Mystery writers: Dennis Lehane William G. Tapply Richard Marinick John F. Dobbyn