Review of Capitol Offense: A Novel (Kindle Edition)
Following his time in DC as a temporary appointed US Senator (see CAPITOL CONSPIRACY) Ben Kincaid has returned home to Tulsa to practice law and consider a run for the permanent seat.Professor Dennis Thomas visits Ben asking the attorney to defend him on a murder rap that has not yet occurred.Dennis hates bureaucrat Police Detective Christopher Sentz who ignored his begging to do a missing person’s search for his wife Josylyn.She died after being trapped inside her car for a week following an accident while her vehicle was in a ravine.
Dennis visits a hotel where Sentz is conducting a sting operation.Soon afterward someone fires seven shots at Sentz killing the cop.Dennis swears to Ben he never killed the man though his rage put him over the edge.Caught with questions of client privilege, Ben wonders if he was set up.Still even as he has a political campaign to run, Ben decides to defend the still fuming professor who is at the center of a media frenzy in which everyone believes he killed the cop, but debate whether grief or madness is a justification.Private Investigator Loving begins to uncover dark secrets involving their client, his late wife and the murdered detective that makes the defense even more insane.
The latest Kincaid thriller will delight long time fans as the hero is back in Oklahoma, but working on a case that his chief of staff tells him to drop as it is political suicide.The story line is fast-paced from the moment Professor Thomas asks Kincaid to defend him from a murder he had not yet committed.Fans will enjoy Ben’s latest CAPITOL OFFENSE as he defends a client who confessed his plan before hand and was found at the murder scene with the corpse.William Bernhardt provides a strong fresh entry with a great unexpected climax and coda.
Harriet Klausner
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Product Description:
In his thrilling novels of suspense, William Bernhardt takes us into the fault lines of the criminal justice system, where one mistake, a twist of fate, or an explosive secret can mean the difference between justice and its cataclysmic undoing. In Capital Offense, attorney Ben Kincaid stands amid the chaos of a violent collision between vengeance and death-and it’s up to him to discover where the truth lies.
Professor Dennis Thomas arrives at the law office of Ben Kincaid with a bizarre request: Thomas wants to know if Kincaid can help him beat a murder charge-of a killing yet to happen. The professor’s intended victim: a Tulsa cop who had refused to authorize a search for Thomas’s missing wife. For seven days, Joslyn Thomas had lain in the twisted wreckage of her car, dying a horrifically slow death in an isolated ravine. Now, insane with grief, Thomas wants to kill Detective Christopher Sentz. Kincaid warns him not to, but that very same day someone fires seven bullets into the police officer.
Suddenly Kincaid’s conversation with Thomas is privileged and Thomas is begging Kincaid to defend him. Thomas claims he didn’t shoot Sentz-even though he’d wanted to. Something about the bookish, addled Dennis Thomas tugs on Kincaid’s conscience, and against all advice, he decides to represent this troubled man in the center of a media and political firestorm.
But the trial doesn’t go Kincaid’s way, and a verdict of capital murder is bearing down on Dennis Thomas. That’s when Kincaid’s personal private detective, Loving, starts prying loose pieces of a shocking secret. Working in the shadows of the law, using every trick that works, Loving risks his life to construct an entirely new narrative about Detective Sentz, Joslyn Thomas, and madness in another guise: the kind that every citizen should fear, and no one will recognize-until it is too late.
From the Hardcover edition.
