Authors: Phillip Margolin.
Hardcover, 368 pages
Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: 2008-05-20


Reviews :

   

New York Times bestselling author Phillip Margolin is back, this time with a powerful tale of murder that snakes its way through Washington, D.C.'s halls of power, leading straight to the White House and the most powerful office on earth.

When private detective Dana Cutler is hired by an attorney with powerful political connections, the assignment seems simple enough: follow a pretty college student named Charlotte Walsh and report on where she goes and whom she sees. But then the unexpected happens. One night, Cutler follows Walsh to a secret meeting with Christopher Farrington, the president of the United States. The following morning, Walsh's dead body shows up and Cutler has to run for her life.

In Oregon, Brad Miller, a junior associate in a huge law firm is working on the appeal of a convicted serial killer. Clarence Little, now on death row, claims he was framed for the murder of a teenager who, at the time of her death, worked for the then governor, Christopher Farrington. Suddenly, a small-time private eye and a fledgling lawyer find themselves in possession of evidence that suggests that someone in the White House is a murderer. Their only problem? Staying alive long enough to prove it.

Executive Privilege, with its nonstop action, unforgettable characters, and edge-of-your-seat suspense, proves once again that Phillip Margolin—whose work has been hailed as "frighteningly plausible" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) and "twisted and brilliant" (Chicago Tribune)—belongs in the top echelon of thriller writers.

...

Authors: Phillip Margolin.
Mass Market Paperback, 480 pages
Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: 2008-05-01


Reviews :

   

Darkness has fallen on the city of Portland, Oregon. One by one, the wives of affluent and respected men are vanishing from their homes. The only clues to their disappearance are a single black rose and a note that reads, "Gone, But Not Forgotten." It is the rebirth of a horror that has already devastated a community at the opposite end of the country—and, as it did then, terror and death will follow.

Defense attorney Betsy Tannenbaum is trapped in a nightmare as the shadows of a killer darken her world. And she will soon be risking everything she has and everyone she loves to defend a cold, powerful, and manipulating client who may be a victim . . . or a monster.

...

Authors: Phillip Margolin.
Mass Market Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: HarperTorch
Publication Date: 2005-02-01


Reviews :

   

They were young, popular, the perfect couple -- an all-American boy and a beautiful cheerleader. But the youthful passion that led them to Lookout Point that terrible evening would prove fatal. For Richie Walters the end came swiftly, as death descended upon him in a savage orgy of horrific violence. Elaine Murray would live long enough to learn just how lucky her boyfriend had been ...

Two brutal slayings have rocked a stunned city. But the murders are merely the nightmare's beginning, flinging open a terrifying Pandora's box of sordid secrets and dark revelations more deadly than the bloodlust that lives in the rock-hard heart of a killer.

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Authors: Phillip Margolin.
Mass Market Paperback, 448 pages
Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: 2007-08-01


Reviews :

   

Defense attorney Doug Weaver believes his client, Jacob Cohen, is innocent—but the forensic evidence proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the meek, mentally ill homeless man killed and dismembered a woman . . .

Hired to defend gangster Art Prochaska against charges that he murdered an informer, lawyer Amanda Jaffe and her father, Frank, have their work cut out for them—because, as improbable as it seems, the forensic clues scream that Prochaska is guilty . . .

And now people are dying inexplicably—as Amanda and Doug join forces to find answers hidden somewhere in the darkest corners of crime scene investigation, where a god-playing madman holds the lethal power to alter the truth.

...

Authors: Phillip Margolin.
Mass Market Paperback, 480 pages
Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: 2008-05-01


Reviews :

   

Seventeen-year-old Ashley Spencer learned what true horror was the night a serial killer invaded her home and brutally murdered her father and her best friend. But the terror did not end there . . .

A year after the unspeakable events, Ashley is still trying to piece together what is left of her life. But the nightmare is reawakened at the elite private school that had appeared to be a safe haven for Ashley and her mother, Terri, when a new book called Sleeping Beauty hits the national bestseller lists—a shattering true account of the crimes that ripped Ashley’s world apart.

And now Ashley must run for her life again.

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Authors: Phillip Margolin.
Mass Market Paperback, 464 pages
Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: 2006-06-01


Reviews :

   

On a summer night in Portland, Oregon, violence erupts at a Little League game -- and attorney Ami Vergano watches in horror as the quiet, gentle artist she recently befriended does the unexpected and unthinkable . . .

In a cheap motel room in Washington, D.C., Vanessa Kohler -- ex-mental patient, supermarket tabloid reporter, and estranged daughter of a powerful general running for president -- views a news broadcast of the bizarre incident and believes she's found the only witness to a deadly conspiracy.

Caught between a possible madwoman and a confessed mass murderer, between reality and delusion, Ami races to unearth the terrible truth about dark events that may or may never have happened twenty years earlier in a secluded cabin on Lost Lake.

...

    Vanessa Kohler wakes from a sound sleep in a California lakeside mansion to find her host, a young Congressman, near death--he's been tortured, his safe is wide open--and the man who seems to have attacked him, is about to flee the house, is Carl Price, someone she once loved. Missing are the documents that prove Vanessa's father, the General, runs a covert military unit of assassins who answer only to him. Once the General arrives on the scene and hustles her off to a mental hospital where she's held for more than a year, her charges are dismissed as the rantings of a crazy woman. A decade later Carl Price reappears, caught in an incident at a Little League game in Oregon that briefly makes the national news and thus brings him to Vanessa's notice again. But by now she's a tabloid reporter, so even those who don't know about her stint in the asylum won't take her charges against the General seriously. And Carl Price may have killed the Congressman, but he's the only person who can prove that the Unit exists; if Vanessa doesn't get him before the General has him killed, he'll never be able to corroborrate her story, and the General may well be elected President.

Vanessa's a more interesting, if less likeable and engaging heroine than Ami, the woman lawyer who tries to help the man she knows as Dan Morelli, a.k.a. Carl Price, who makes beautiful furniture, lives comfortably in the apartment over her garage, and is a surrogate father to her young son. But the official records of Carl Price reveal a whole other side of her friend and client, and when the psychiatrist to whom Dan has also revealed his alter identity and the General's secret is tortured and killed in the same way the Congressman was, she's not certain whom to believe. The complicated plot is a little over the top, but Margolin drives his thriller to its bloody denouement with the same fast pace and velocity that will probably drive it to the bestseller list, just like his previous books. --Jane Adams...

Authors: Phillip Margolin.
Mass Market Paperback, 464 pages
Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: 2008-05-01


Reviews :

   

Amanda Jaffe was a rising star in Portland's legal community until her well publicized battle with a brilliant sociopath—ironically the trial that made her famous—left her traumatized, filled with self-doubt, and wary of the limelight. But now she's agreed to handle a case no one else will touch.

Her client, Jon Dupre, runs an upscale call-girl service and stands accused of murdering a high-profile U.S. senator. To Amanda, Dupre's story of an ultra-secret society of extremely powerful, dangerous, politically motivated men sounds like a criminal's desperate attempt to escape justice. But suddenly too many important people are pressuring her to drop the case . . . and too many people are dying.

But Amanda will not surrender again to her fear. To get her life back, she'll follow this deadly juggernaut of an investigation wherever it leads her: to the graveyard, into the depths of hell . . . or to the highest office in the land.

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    Bestselling author Phillip Margolin brings back Portland lawyer Amanda Jaffe for a repeat performance (after Wild Justice) in this mystery about a group of college killers who grow into a cadre of powerful political and business leaders bent on keeping their boyhood adventures concealed--as well as their present-day connection with a gang of cutthroat South American drug lords. There's big biotech money involved, enough to keep the so-called Vaughn Street Glee Club intent on making sure anyone who knows about their plans is silenced. Permanently, if necessary. It's up to Amanda to unmask the reason why the Glee Club is so anxious for her client Jon Dupre, the accused killer of a U.S. senator, to go down for murder. And what she learns about the lengths to which they'll go to keep their secrets, including killing members of their own family, threatens her life as well. Margolin strings a clumsy plot on a weak thread--why three affluent college boys become killers is never adequately explained--and the heroine, whose dogged perseverance is admirable, is otherwise too boring to capture the reader's interest. --Jane Adams...

Authors: Phillip Margolin.
Mass Market Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: HarperTorch
Publication Date: 2002-08-01


Reviews :

   

A poster boy for the American Dream, former blue collar boy turned high-powered lawyer Daniel Ames is on easy street as an associate at Reed, Briggs, Portland's most prestigious law firm.

Until one man...and one case...changes everything.

When a charismatic lawyer sues the firm's biggest client, a pharmaceutical company, for manufacturing a drug that causes unspeakable birth defects, Daniel believes the case has no merit. But when information implicating company malfeasance surfaces, the intrepid lawyer doggedly scrambles to find the truth--an investigation that leads him into a vortex of greed, corruption, deceit, and murder. Suddenly caught on the wrong side of the law and in the crosshairs of a powerful enemy, Daniel must unmask an evil conspiracy that wants to bury a deadly secret...and Daniel with it.

...

    Daniel Ames, a blue-collar associate at a preppy, white-shoe law firm, gets snookered by a pretty colleague into reviewing thousands of pages of documents. The client, a pharmaceutical company, is charged with falsifying test results on a new drug that appears to cause horrendous birth defects. Daniel is sure the company didn't do it, but among all the documents he overlooks a letter that could destroy his client's defense. The opposing counsel gets hold of it, and the next thing you know, Daniel's smack in the middle of a murder as well as the attendant legal fraud and chicanery. Who else, besides its manufacturer, wants the truth about the drug trials covered up? Whose body, charred almost beyond recognition, was found in the lab along with a score of dead test monkeys? And what's the connection between a double kidnapping and murder that happened years ago in Arizona and the headline-grabbing lawyer that's trying to pin the blame on Daniel's client for the drug's terrible effects?

Phillip Margolin, author of seven previous bestsellers (including Wild Justice), is clearly venturing into John Grisham territory here. Although he rarely probes beneath the surface of his central characters, he spins an electrifying yarn in this provocative thriller. --Jane Adams...

Authors: Phillip Margolin.
Mass Market Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: HarperTorch
Publication Date: 2001-08-01


Reviews :

   

Seven years ago, Phillip Margolin seized the imagination of thriller readers everywhere with his chilling breakout bestseller, Gone, but Not Forgotten. After five subsequent New York Times bestsellers, Margolin now returns to the haunting terrain of Gone, but Not Forgotten with a mesmerizing tour de force of psychological suspense, an electrifying tale of revenge and retribution that shows a master storyteller at the very peak of his craft.

Thursday: Subject is still combative after four days of applied pain, sleep deprivation and minimal food.

Vice squad detective Bobby Vasquez, for months on the trail of a slippery underworld figure, receives an anonymous tip that directs him to a mountain cabin. He races through the idyllic Oregon woods, expecting to close the book on a long-standing vendetta. What he finds instead opens a Pandora's box of horror that will haunt him to his dying day.

8:10: Subject bound and gaffed and placed in upstairs closet at end of hall. Turned out lights in house, drove off, then parked and doubled back. Watched from woods.

Within hours, Vincent Cordoni -- a brilliant surgeon with a history of violence and drug abuse -- is arrested for a heinous crime. Facing a seemingly insurmountable wall of evidence, he turns to Portland's top criminal defense attorney, Frank Jaffe-who, along with his ambitious daughter, Amanda, must put on an inspired defense. Amanda's first taste of criminal defense work is as intoxicating as it is chilling, but it raises moral questions she's loath to address. Is she defending an innocent man? Or is she using her considerable skills to set a monster free? Then Cardoni disappears under bizarre circumstances. Four years later, a second set of murders has begun ....

8:55: Subject exits house, naked and barefoot, armed with kitchen knife. Remarkable strength of character. Breaking her will be a challenge.

Has Cardoni resurfaced to ply his deadly trade anew? Is there a copycat killer? Or has the real killer been someone else all along? The police will do everything they can to stop Cardoni -- but they have to find him first.

Following a twisting trail of clues, including a harrowing diary that clinically records the killer's horrible deeds, Amanda Jaffe and Bobby Vasquez join the hunt-and themselves become targets of the twenty-first century's first genuinely monstrous psychopath.

:...

    When a killing field is unearthed in the Oregon woods, it's linked to a Portland surgeon whose increasingly aggressive behavior and explosive temper have already drawn the attention of his colleagues. Neophyte attorney Amanda Jaffe takes second chair to her father, a successful criminal lawyer retained by Dr. Vincent Cardoni when he is charged with multiple counts of murder. The victims have one thing in common: they are missing vital organs, which were clearly harvested by an expert surgeon. In this explosive and fast-paced suspense thriller, the forensic evidence against Cardoni is so convincing that even after his acquittal on a technicality, the reader, like Amanda, is sure of his guilt. And when a similar field of mutilated bodies turns up years later, Cardoni is again the primary suspect. But Cardoni has disappeared, and this time it's his former wife, Justine Castle, who's implicated in the new crimes, and Amanda who's retained as the lead attorney in the case.

The particulars of the killings are so similar to the first set of murders that Amanda is convinced Cardoni is involved. When he is found to be working at the same hospital where he was once a promising surgeon (this time as a custodian and under an assumed name), she draws the logical conclusion. But when she finds Cardoni's severed hand at the scene of the crimes, she is forced to rethink the assumptions on which her defense of the doctor's ex-wife is based. Could Justine, in fact, be the killer? Author Phillip Margolin's newest book moves at an almost frantic pace. Bodies pile up, evidence mounts, and everything points to Cardoni's guilt until the end, a stunner that surprises Amanda as well as the reader. This chilling, deftly crafted novel will hold the reader's attention to the last page. --Jane Adams...

Authors: Phillip Margolin.
Digital, pages
Publisher: Amazon
Publication Date: 2006-07-13


Reviews :

    I've always thought of myself as a fan more than a writer. Never in a million years did I imagine that I'd ever get my fiction published, let alone have all of my books become New York Times bestsellers. It wasn't until I was in my 30's that I published my first short story, “The Girl in the Yellow Bikini.” It was released in 1974 in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. In mid-2002, it was re-printed as a booklet and shrink-wrapped to the French edition of Elle fashion magazine. I hope both new and old fans will enjoy it!...