Praise for Wolf's Revenge:
A Publishers Weekly best mystery/thriller of 2017
“Smith’s novels have been described as Russian Doll mysteries—one problem solved, another revealed. In its complexity, Wolf’s Revenge might remind a reader of a John le Carré novel; few are who they seem to be. Spies and double agents abound. This novel has action, some violence, but its real strengths are its intricacy and some rather dispiriting revelations about our criminal justice system.”—Tuscaloosa News
“Operating at the top of his game, Smith combines a mystery with the overlay of existential dread that noir fans relish with as much skill as anyone writing today.”—Publishers Weekly, best mystery/thrillers of 2017
“[An] outstanding series . . . Unreservedly recommended.”—Midwest Book Review
“Full of revelations, surprises and shocks . . . Wolf’s Revenge is the best installment of the series to date. Smith’s ongoing brooding take on San Francisco’s seedier streets is darkly attractive, with the walking flotsam and jetsam occupying it, serving as quick but effective cautionary tales about the evils of bad companions and choices.”—Bookreporter
“Smith again puts Leo Maxwell through the wringer in his superlative fifth mystery featuring the San Francisco attorney . . . Operating at the top of his game, Smith is as good as anyone writing today at combining a mystery with the overlay of existential dread that noir fans relish.”—Publishers Weekly (boxed & starred review)
“Readers will find themselves inexorably drawn toward the book’s explosive conclusion.”—Mystery Scene
Praise for Lachlan Smith & the Leo Maxwell mystery series:
“Lachlan Smith does a masterful turn in Fox Is Framed. A sharp-edged legal thriller with the deep emotional undertones of family drama and tragedy.”—Reed Farrel Coleman, New York Times bestselling author of Robert B. Parker’s Blind Spot
“Lachlan Smith has done the impossible—written a riveting debut novel that stands with the best legal thrillers on my bookshelf.”—Linda Fairstein, on Bear Is Broken
“Smart, complex, and original . . . The characters got me hooked, the legal story got me to stay, and the originality of the telling stuck with me when I was finished.”—Mystery Scene, on Fox Is Framed
“Fans of Scott Turow will relish Smith’s outstanding fourth Russian nesting doll of a whodunit featuring San Francisco lawyer Leo Maxwell . . . The plotting is impeccable, and Smith adds even more layers to his complex lead, while creating a San Francisco as morally ambiguous as Turow’s Kindle County.”—Publishers Weekly (boxed & starred review), on Panther’s Prey
“Smith is masterly in creating realistic courtroom scenes . . . and, even more impressively, enhances the trial with the human drama of the Smith family.”—Publishers Weekly (boxed and starred review), on Fox Is Framed
“Legal mysteries would be much more enjoyable if they didn’t have self-aggrandizing lawyers in them. Lachlan Smith makes tidy work of neutralizing that problem in his first novel . . . Smith doesn’t write like a novice.”—New York Times Book Review, on Bear Is Broken
05/15/2017
In this latest from Smith, who won the 2014 Shamus Award for Best First PI Novel, attorney-detective Leo Maxwell defends a young woman who was cornered into murdering a member of the Aryan Brotherhood while working to distance himself and his family from a prison-based gang. Promotion at ALA.
2017-07-04
Smith, hot in contention for whatever award is given for the multivolume mystery series that sounds more and more like installments in a single endless story, puts his hero, San Francisco attorney Leo Maxwell, through a fifth round in the wringer.Just because Leo's client Bo Wilder, a homicidal gang leader, is serving a life sentence doesn't mean he can't still wreak havoc on Leo and his family, as he does when he arranges for Jack Sims, an underling with a serious appetite for more power, to snatch Carly, the daughter of Leo's brain-damaged brother, Teddy, from a baseball game and smilingly return her a few minutes later. It's instantly clear that Wilder wants something from Leo—in this case, his legal services on behalf of the Jane Doe several witnesses saw shoot Aryan Brotherhood stalwart Randolph Edwards on a Tenderloin street—but Leo realizes only gradually that he and Teddy and their father, Lawrence, whose fraught encounters with every side of the law have already put his sons permanently on their toes, have, without doing anything new, stepped into the middle of a war whose participants range from the Aryan Brotherhood to the FBI. Since Smith has already shown that he's not shy about killing off Leo's nearest and dearest (Panther's Prey, 2016, etc.), Leo can only oscillate between preparing his impossible defense of Alice Ward, whose mother was murdered a week after a 1999 restaurant robbery that probably involved her neighbors Sims and Edwards as well, and savoring the irony of the Brotherhood paying for the defense of an African-American accused of murdering one of their number, all while he waits to get the next telephone call informing him that it's time to call the mortician he must keep on speed dial. Though Smith conscientiously provides a good deal of back story explaining what's at stake for the hero and his family, this series is getting harder and harder to plunge into the middle of. Fans are advised to start from the beginning (Bear Is Broken, 2013) and take it from there.
