Reviewed By: Carl Brookins - RAM
Putting Lipstick on a Pig
Amazon US HC Amazon Canada HC
Michael Bowen
Class/Genre: Mystery Legal Setting Thriller
Series: Rep and Melissa Pennyworth # 3
Poisoned Pen Press, Hardcover, 254 pages $24.95, July, 2006
Another clever, ironic, funny, novel about lawyering in Milwaukee. It's author Bowen's third novel in this series and it may be even better than the first two. Bowen is a practicing attorney and he gets the law part really right. He also gets plotting right. Again with attorney Rep Pennyworth and his brilliant and attractive wife, Melissa.
The novel is replete with literary allusions that seem eminently appropriate for the characters and the circumstances. That is to say, you never get a sense that here is the author calling attention to his education. The dialogue snaps as does the action.
One of the never-ending tasks of an author dealing with an amateur sleuth, which Rep Pennyworth is, since his area of expertise is not criminal law, is how you engage the protagonist in a realistic way. Bowen does this excellently. Pennyworth is called on to deliver a eulogy for an unliked and (to Pennyworth) a rather unknown colleague who drowned one winter night after drunkenly driving a snowmobile onto a lake in . Accidental suicide is the prevailing opinion, until Pennyworth begins to follow his instincts for detail and getting hard questions answered.
Coincidence piles on coincidence, except they turn out not to be coincidental at all. That Rep's wife, Melissa, becomes ensnared in the tangled twisted plot is another possible stumbling block that Bowen handles in a masterly way.
Just a fine, well-written and briskly laid out exposition with an eminently satisfying conclusion. What more could one ask?
Carl Brookins - RAM
Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Carl Brookins - RAM
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