Wolf's Revenge

by Lachlan Smith Narrated by R. C. Bray

Overview

In Wolf's Revenge, the fifth novel in Lachlan Smith's Shamus Award-winning series, attorney-detective Leo Maxwell seeks an exit strategy from his family's deepening entanglement with a ruthless prison-based gang. Caught between the criminals and the FBI, Leo charts his own path in defending a young woman who was manipulated into brazenly murdering a member of the Aryan Brotherhood in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. When the consequences strike heartbreakingly close to home, Leo, his brother Teddy, and the rest of the family are forced into a winner-takes-all confrontation with men who don't care how many innocents they harm in achieving their goals. As Leo's world collapses, long-held secrets are revealed, transforming his perspective on the aftermath of the tragedy that derailed his childhood and fractured his family twenty-one years ago.



Leo comes to realize there's no such thing as fair play in the battle against a prison gang that's already being punished to the full extent of the law. The question then becomes who will get revenge first-the Maxwells or the sadistic gang leader who pursues them?

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for Wolf's Revenge :

“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

“[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)

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

Library Journal

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.

Kirkus Reviews

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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170156191
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	10/03/2017
Series:	Leo Maxwell Mystery , #5
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

One thought simultaneously heartened and chilled me. If the man I’d noticed earlier had taken my niece, this likely was no random abduction. Far more probable was that Carly had been targeted by a man named Bo Wilder. If Wilder had ordered this, it was to send a message, either to my brother Teddy or to me. Wilder had no reason to hurt Carly.

Not unless one of us had given him one.

Whenever I passed an usher or security guard I shouted my alarm about a lost girl. I’d run a near-complete circle of the stadium before my phone vibrated. It was Teddy. “We found her,” he said. “A guy brought her back.”

I slowed to a walk, but only for a moment. Then I began to jog again. I arrived at our section and slowed, trying to look casual as I came down the stairs, my hard breathing reminding me how long it’d been since I’d ridden my bike. The man with the prison muscles was there. Carly stood looking down at a little green-shirted mascot doll he must have bought for her. I came down the steps behind them and grabbed the guy’s arm.

He turned, his smile betraying no sign of the pressure I was exerting just above his massive triceps, his arm as thick around as the leg of a sedentary man, his head shaved bald. I pulled out my cell phone and suggested that Carly pose for a picture with the man.

His expression didn’t fade as I snapped a series of shots. His hand remained on Carly’s shoulder, but his eyes never left my face.

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