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Title: Veritas
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Manufacturer: HarperCollins e-books
List Price: $6.99
Our Price: $5.59
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| Customer Reviews: |
| Veritas by HarperCollins e-books Bitter Truth | | Very upset to learn this is same book previously published under title of Veritas. Don't think author's should change titles to increase book sales of same book. Watch out! | | Veritas by HarperCollins e-books OK, but needs a good editor | I read a lot of hard-boiled detective fiction and legal thrillers and am always looking for new authors. When a friend recommended the Victor Carl series I immediately ordered 3 from Amazon with great anticipation. I found them OK, but not great. They are solidly in the tradition of the flawed hero/detective going down the mean streets, and getting involved in Ross MacDonald-like cases in which the past haunts the present. All that makes them pretty interesting.
However, the books are WAY too long. Lashner's editor needs to cut about 200-300 pages from each one. There's way too much of Carl's interior musings - he's just not than interesting, and interferes seriously with the plot development. To anyone familiar with the genre the actual mystery is very slowly developed and the plot holds few surprises. Some of the characters and subplots are interesting, but by the time you get to the end, the resolution has been so obvious for so long, that I find I have been skimming for about the last third of the book.
Fun to pass some time with when you're out of Crais, Connelly, Child, etc. | | Veritas by HarperCollins e-books This is a retitled work from 1997, then called " Veritas " | | reviewers need to recognize this retitling of an older work | | Veritas by HarperCollins e-books Victor Carl and the Case of the Pickle Heiress | William Lashner has written a pretty good series of books featuring Victor Carl, a Philadelphia lawyer whose desire to be utterly mercenary is often impeded by a weak but definitely present set of ethics. Bitter Truth is the second book in the series, and even if not Lashner at his best, it is still a quite enjoyable book.
As this novel starts, Victor is subsisting primarily on his fees as a reluctant mob lawyer. While a nice source of income, this role also interferes with his natural sense of self-preservation. He is retained by Caroline Shaw, heir to the Reddman Pickle Empire which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Caroline wants Victor to look into the death of her sister; although ruled a suicide, Caroline suspects mob involvement, hence her hiring of Victor. Although she is paying him a nice $10,000 fee, Victor smells much greater money, the sort that can allow him to quit lawyering and retire to some South Seas island.
Of course, such great wealth would not be easy to come by, and Victor soon finds himself in a boatload of trouble. He becomes involved with a strange little cult which is not above violence to stop Victor's investigation; more seriously, he also gets entangled in a mob war. But the key problems come from the Reddman/Shaw family itself, a clan with a closet full of skeletons. Although fabulously wealthy, the family seems to exist under a curse of death and insanity. The mansion that they are centered around is a practically Gothic haunted house; despite their vast funds, the house is in disrepair and even the food that is served is unpleasant. To earn his money, Victor will need to sort out the family secrets and unearth crimes that date back a century.
As mentioned previously, this is not Lashner's best book, but it is good. There is some intangible quality that seems to be missing from this one that prevents me from giving it a full five stars. As someone who has read the four Victor Carl books completely out of order (3, 1, 4, 2), I can confidently say that they don't need to be read in sequence and each stands alone, so if you want to start reading Lashner, this may be as good a place as any.
| | Veritas by HarperCollins e-books Being a newbie reader of Lashner, I did not know what to expect | What I found was a very pleasant surprise. Lashner weaves and winds plots, characters and dialogue in a way that makes you late for the train, miss meetings and forget to eat. This book is hard to put down.
Nothing contrived, thoroughly entertaining, nicely edited and put together. He manages to describe a scene without making it forced or boring. Just the right amount of context and atmosphere, seasoned with interesting characters.
Reading this book will force me to the bookstore to search out his other works. That is saying a lot, even for a bookhog like me. | | Veritas by HarperCollins e-books Product Description | "A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing." -- Albert Camus "I suppose every hundred million dollars has its own sordid story and the hundred million I am chasing is no exception..." So begins Veritas, William Lashner's riveting follow-up to his bestselling debut novel, Hostile Witness. Victor Carl--lawyer, loser, hapless hero of Hostile Witness, and a Philadelphian way out of his element--has come to the sweat-drenched jungles of Belize to chase his fortune. Finding it is something else entirely. Coerced into defending an unpleasant parade of mob enforcers, two-bit hoods, and other Philadelphian riffraff, Carl wants out of his shabby, squalid life more than ever. So when a terrified young woman offers Carl an unusual--but substantial--proposition, he leaps at the opportunity to trade in his grubby existence for a life of wealthy excess. The job--proving that the recent suicide of wealthy Philadelphian heiress Jacqueline Shaw was not a suicide at all but murder--plunges Carl into an eerie shadow world, where events buried deep in the past exert an awful weight in the present, a world of overturned gravesites, gruesome secrets, and a haunted, lonely estate that houses the broken and dying heirs of a once-powerful family. Simultaneously caught up in an exploding mob war and the machinations of an avaricious cult, Carl realizes too late that he's in way over his head, as he races against time to collect his fee and get out alive. As Carl edges closer to the truth, a truth that is concealed in the mists of a bygone era and now awaits him in the rainforests of Belize, he learns firsthand that the most terrifying darkness crouches not in the heart of the jungle surrounding him but in the deepest yearnings of the human soul. | | Veritas by HarperCollins e-books Amazon.com | | Victor Carl, the endearingly bent but effective Philadelphia defense attorney of choice for professional criminals great and small, is back--which is good news for the many fans of William Lashner's Hostile Witness. In Veritas, Carl is hired by a young woman who is convinced that her sister's suicide was really a Mob hit. But Carl, who knows from Mob hits, doesn't believe it. He and his attractive client search for the truth inside Veritas (get it?), the shabby mansion where the family secrets lie buried. |
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