Blurb:

Eddie Flynn used to be a con artist. Then he became a lawyer. Turned out the two weren’t that different.

It’s been over a year since Eddie vowed never to set foot in a courtroom again. But now he doesn’t have a choice. Olek Volchek, the infamous head of the Russian mafia in New York, has strapped a bomb to Eddie’s back and kidnapped his ten-year-old daughter, Amy. Eddie only has forty-eight hours to defend Volchek in an impossible murder trial – and win – if he wants to save his daughter.

Under the scrutiny of the media and the FBI, Eddie must use his razor-sharp wit and every con-artist trick in the book to defend his ‘client’ and ensure Amy’s safety. With the timer on his back ticking away, can Eddie convince the jury of the impossible?

Review:

The Defence is not Cavanagh’s best known work, and I really want to read the more recent Thirteen and Fifty Fifty, but I am loathe to start in the middle of a series and so I embarked upon this first novel in the series. I had some idea of what to expect, but I did not foresee this adrenaline fuelled, explosive storyline which made me drop my jaw on the first page and not straighten it until the end. Cavanagh’s writing is so immersive and I did not want to let go.

The American legal system is not something with which I’m particularly familiar, but Cavanagh clearly has a lot of knowledge about how proceedings work and uses this to inform the reader. I imagine that in real life, some of the processes are actually quite dull but he manages to inject an awful lot of drama into the court scenes that held my attention for the whole novel.

Eddie Flynn is not your average lawyer and to be honest, if he was, there wouldn’t be much of a book. However, he charmed me and I am excited to see what he is involved in next. He has a complex back story that has been well developed and I loved his relationship with his daughter and I look forward to learning more about him.

The Defence is available from Amazon.