Wild Justice

Philip M Margolin

A black market in the selling of human organs. A deal left incomplete, with deadly consequences...

Martin Breach is not a man who likes unfinished business. So when Dr Clifford Grant takes his money, but fails to deliver the heart as promised, his days are numbered. In order to save himself, Grant's business associate knows he has no option but to terminate the partnership. And his partner.

When Grant's body is discovered, he is not the only victim to die at the hands of his colleague in crime. At a mountain cabin, nine bodies are discovered, and not all of them in one piece. The chief suspect is Vincent Cardoni, a surgeon with a suspected drugs problem, who was seen accosting one of the victims, and whose fingerprints were found all over the cabin. But Cardoni not only denies the charges, he also claims he has been set up by his ex-wife Justine, with whom he is in the middle of a bitterly contested divorce.

When Cardoni is released on a technicality and subsequently vanishes, the police assume that Breach has had a hand in his disappearance. Then four years later, a similarly gruesome set of murders are uncovered. Except this time it is Cardoni's ex-wife who is chief suspect, and Cardoni who is being accused of doing the setting up...

Phillip M. Margolin's latest thriller uses his huge legal knowledge and innate narrative ability to dazzling effect, with a plot as gripping as it is unpredictable.

Review by Chrissi (010502) Rating (8/10)

Review by Chrissi
Well, I have to admit that this one had me stumped, there are so many red herrings and twists that you really do not know whether you are coming or going. The problem is that someone somewhere has been killing people so that the organs can be sold. An organ has been removed from a person so that it can be sold to a powerful criminal. Unfortunately the man carrying the heart is stopped at the airport by the police and the heart is seized.

The criminal is not sympathetic to this problem, having already paid a substantial amount of money to the doctors involved. He now is furious and starts to hunt them down to retrieve his money and to make a point in case anyone else lets him down.

The lawyer who becomes involved with this is a young woman, working with her father to defend a doctor with a serious drugs problem. He has previously been married to another young doctor and this has broken down irretrievably, and, he feels, she has set him up. He is accused of killing the people for their organs after a scalpel and a coffee cup are found at a secluded mountain cabin where the surgery has taken place. He is such a horrid man that you really feel that he could have done these awful acts, and when he escapes, and more bodies are found, you think that maybe he could still be out there.

The blurb on the book says that it is easily as good as Grisham or Turow, but it is just a bit too complicated, and the author lays too many trails. It is very well done, and I would read another of his should I come across one, but I would rather that he did not try so hard to bamboozle me and just concentrated on telling a good story well.
Chrissi (1st May 2002)