The Last Goodbye - Hardcover

Arvin, Reed

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060555513 ISBN 13: 9780060555511

Publisher: Harper, 2004

Synopsis

From the hot new suspense writer critics predict will have Grisham fans "switching their allegiance in midstream" comes a thrilling tale of love and murder set on the mean streets and in the sleek society haunts of Atlanta. . . .

Sleeping with a client's gorgeous girlfriend may have been the gutsiest move in Jack Hammond's formerly booming law career, but it wasn't the smartest. Booted from his elite law firm, Jack now scrapes by as a court-appointed attorney, his client list a revolving door of small-time drug offenders and petty thieves.

When his friend -- a computer whiz and former addict who'd brought his life back from the brink -- is found dead in his apartment with a syringe stuck in his arm, Jack knows something is very wrong.

Where the cops see just another overdose, Jack sees a murder. Investigating the case, he learns that his friend was obsessed with a beautiful singer -- who also happens to be half of the most popular power couple in Atlanta.

Talented and privileged, the spellbinding Michele Sonnieris nevertheless a deeply troubled woman, plagued by secrets. Against his better judgment -- and in a disturbing echo of his earlier fall from grace -- Jack is pulled further and further into her world, where he discovers more suspicious deaths, all pointing toward a mysterious cover-up.

A volatile tale of love, betrayal, and murder shot through with tenderness and poignant humanity, The Last Goodbye is a riveting thriller with a thunderously beating heart, a masterful page-turner that probes the meaning of love and the burdens of the past.

About this title

About the Author

Reed Arvin grew up on a cattle ranch in rural Kansas. After a successful career as a music producer in Nashville, Arvin began writing full-time. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

From the Back Cover

"The Last Goodbye is the best thing a thriller can be: suspenseful, intelligent and well-written. Reed Arvin is the real deal."
-Harlan Coben, author of No Second Chance

"I was moved by this gritty, romantic thriller. It's a heartbreaking love song to modern Atlanta its tragedies, its promises, its failure, its dreams. The Last Goodbye is magnolias and humidity, yet it's also crime and redemption. I've never met Reed Arvin, but I'd be proud to claim him as kin."
-Margaret Maron, author of Last Lessons of Summer

"A rare achievementReed Arvin has crafted a first-rate thriller that works both as an airplane read and as a serious novel. The Last Goodbye has depth, original characters and plot twists that truly surprise."
-Phillip Margolin, author of The Ties That Bind

Reviews

"As usual, the story begins with a woman crying." So says Atlanta lawyer Jack Hammond in this mesmerizing thriller about a good man caught in a web of bad love and murder. Beautiful client Violeta Ramirez is doing the crying on behalf of her dope-dealer boyfriend when Jack tumbles so hard for her his high-flying legal career is grounded and Violeta ends up dead. Two years later, Jack is working out of his one-man law office fishing for clients at the bottom of the criminal pool when he begins investigating the suspicious overdose death of his old college pal, Doug Townsend. With the help of a local hacker, Nightmare, Jack unlocks Doug's computer and stumbles into a quagmire involving the deaths of eight hepatitis C patients who were all enrolled in an experimental drug trial gone horribly wrong. Doug was also strangely obsessed with beautiful African-American opera singer Michele Sonnier, as is Jack after one look at her photos and a night at the opera. That her husband is the billionaire CEO of a local drug firm with its own hep C drug makes the liaison even more dangerous. After finding the disgraced researcher who headed the botched drug trial, Jack and his lowlife helpers begin to make real headway in solving the case. Even though melancholy, wisecracking Jack is a lawyer, this isn't a legal thriller so much as a knight-in-shining armor tale with the hero cast in the mold of the great Travis McGee. It's not Grisham that Arvin (The Will) should be compared to, but the incomparable John D. MacDonald. Those readers who value intelligence, fine writing and action will find it all in this outstanding novel.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* Doug Townsend is just another overdose as far as the Atlanta cops are concerned. His friend and lawyer, Jack Hammond, doesn't share the cavalier attitude. His suspicions multiply when he learns that Doug's fatal dosage was delivered intravenously despite a lifelong needle phobia. Jack also learns Doug had an obsessive interest in Michele Sonnier, the hottest star in American opera and the trophy wife of Charles Ralston, founder of Horizn Pharmaceuticals. Jack contacts Sonnier and soon learns her well-hidden secret: Michele grew up in Atlanta's poorest, most notorious housing project and had an illegitimate child, whom she gave up for adoption while still a child herself. Doug was tracking down her daughter for her. Did Ralston's company, about to go public with a well-publicized cure for Parkinson's, get rid of Doug rather than allow him to drag the CEO through a scandal? Jack, himself a man with a regrettable past, enlists the aid of a Fagin's army of borderline miscreants to help Michele and, in the process, discover what Horizn is trying to hide. Arvin's first legal thriller, The Will (2000), generated excellent reviews. His second just might kick him to a whole new level, critically and commercially. He presents love, sex, money, power, and violence in an irresistibly melancholy noir package in which redemption is the motive but hell beckons at every turn. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060555513
• ISBN 13: 9780060555511
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352