Lost Lake - Hardcover

Margolin, Phillip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060735023 ISBN 13: 9780060735029

Publisher: Harper, 2005

Synopsis

It's a beautiful summer night in Portland, Oregon.Ami Vergano, a young attorney and single mother, arrives at her son Ryan's Little League game with their tenant and new friend, Dan Morelli. When the assistant coach calls in sick, Morelli seems happy to help out. But then one player roughly blocks another, and a fight erupts. Before the game ends, Ami witnesses violence that shocks and horrifies her and makes her question everything she thought she knew about Morelli.

On the other side of the continent, in a cheap motel room in Washington, D.C., ex-mental patient Vanessa Kohler, a reporter for Exposed, a tabloid that specializes in alien-abduction stories, watches a piece on television about the Little League massacre and quickly places a call to the FBI. For years she's been telling anyone who will listen about a vast government conspiracy to conceal a secret military unit headed by Gen. Morris Wingate, a presidential candidate, and for years every-one has dismissed her stories. But when Vanessa sees Dan Morelli fighting, she believes she's found the key to proving that her theories are true.

Vanessa hires Ami Vergano to represent Morelli, who is charged with attempted murder, and Ami is drawn into Vanessa's paranoid world. Are Vanessa, a former mental patient, and Morelli, a confessed mass murderer, telling the truth about one of the nation's most respected soldiers and politicians? Or are their charges a product of two sick minds? Ami has to decide who -- and what -- to believe, in Phillip Margolin's most exciting and surprising thriller since his breakout bestseller, Gone, But Not Forgotten.

About this title

Review:

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

About the Author:

Phillip Margolin has written nineteen novels, many of them New York Times bestsellers, including his latest novels Woman with a Gun, Worthy Brown’s Daughter, Sleight of Hand, and the Washington trilogy. Each displays a unique, compelling insider’s view of criminal behavior, which comes from his long background as a criminal defense attorney who has handled thirty murder cases. Winner of the Distinguished Northwest Writer Award, he lives in Portland, Oregon.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0060735023
• ISBN 13: 9780060735029
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336