Last Witness - Softcover

Jilliane Hoffman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0718147138 ISBN 13: 9780718147136

Publisher: Penguin, 2005

Synopsis

A riveting new novel from the internationally bestselling author of Retribution.

Cops are dying. Hunted down while on patrol, they are being murdered while trying to protect the citizens of Miami from this very type of crime. Dominick Falconetti, an agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, is charged with heading a task force to investigate. Details at the crime scenes point to a drug connection, and when a highly-placed gang member disappears, it reinforces Dominick's suspicions that these cops were all involved in something unsavory.

C. J. Townsend, the state prosecutor he has loved for the past three years-ever since they met on the infamous Cupid investigation-is getting the calls in the middle of the night as well. As the state attorney who put Florida's last serial killer behind bars, she's the logical choice to help stop this one. But before long, C.J. begins to suspect that she knows an even more terrible secret than Dominick does about why these cops are being murdered.

A tense, gripping crime drama set against the richly detailed background of the Miami legal system and police department,

Last Witness is an extraordinary novel.

About this title

About the Author:

Jilliane Hoffman served as an assistant state attorney in Miami, where she was a felony prosecutor with special assignments to the Extradition/Legal Unit and the Domestic Violence Unit.

From Publishers Weekly:

Truth and justice collide in former prosecutor Hoffman's sequel to Retribution. Miami Assistant State Attorney C.J. Townsend finds herself living a nightmare, beginning with a call to go to the homicide scene of Victor Chavez, a cop who helped her convict serial killer William Bantling. Chavez's body has been mutilated, his tongue twisted into what a former DEA officer calls the "Colombian necktie." Early clues to this and subsequent, equally brutal, murders point to Florida's drug underworld, but Townsend's fiancé, Special Agent Dominick Falconetti, and his team track the case back to Bantling. Falconetti is arrested for assaulting the ever-taunting Bantling, but even with the lead detective off the investigation, troubling facts emerge, while Townsend, haunted by her role in Bantling's trial (she withheld evidence to put the man who raped her on death row), tries to distance herself. Instead, she must confront her torturer in court, putting her career, her relationship and eventually her life at risk. Reminders of fictional predecessors (Bantling in Hannibal Lecter restraints, Townsend's Dirty Harriet heroics) and occasional uninspired romantic passages are Hoffman's weakness; procedural detail and methodical depiction of the horrific are her strength. She combines the gruesome precision of Patricia Cornwell, the courtroom savvy of Linda Fairstein and the Miami setting of Edna Buchanan to produce an unsettling tale that, unlike most detective fiction, is not neatly tied up at the end. Agent, Luke Janklow. Foreign rights sold in 10 countries. (May)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0718147138
• ISBN 13: 9780718147136
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 356