Shot twice. Plummeted into cardiac arrest. Pulled from the depths of a nasty coma. Attorney Matthew Hope�s had a rough few months. So when a slightly cross-eyed beauty brings him a cushy copyright infringement suit over a similarly cross-eyed teddy bear named Gladly, all signs point to an easy victory. But before Hope can sue, he gets sucked into another case. The charge: homicide. The main suspect: his lovely, cockeyed client, Lainie Commins.
With western Florida�s opulent mansions rising above sunbaked squalor and yacht clubs only a step removed from a seedy, drug-and-sex-filled underbelly, unraveling Lainie�s increasingly shady alibis won�t be easy. But Hope has to figure out if she�s just a plaintiff with an ocular defect or a beauty with deadeye aim.
Grand Master Award�winning author Ed McBain paints a crooked world where justice is elusive and telling the difference between the good and the murderous takes a keen eye.
Amazon.com Review
This time around Matthew Hope finds himself in southern Florida and in a mess. A woman he's representing is suing a toy manufacturer she says stole her idea. The problem is, the president of the toy company was murdered, and guess who's the prime suspect? The other problem--or problems--is that Hope's primary private investigator winds up on a boat kidnapped by drug runners leaving Hope, who is still smarting from gunshot wounds he collected in other adventures, to contact by himself the subjects for the investigation, all of whom reside on boats. Got that? He does get some help, in the form of an old-school PI named Guthrie Lamb, who throws in his techniques to try to crack this rather nutty case.
From Publishers Weekly
Hero/narrator Matthew Hope, recovered from gunshots and a coma (There Was a Little Girl, 1994) and, true to his earlier resolve, practicing only civil law in (fictional) Calusa, Fla., represents the plaintiff in a suit involving the eponymous teddy bear, named after a mis-heard line in a hymn ("Gladly the cross I'd bear"). Young toy designer Lainie Commins is suing her ex-boss, toy manufacturer Brett Toland, for copyright and patent infringement, contending that his cross-eyed bear is a direct steal from hers. When Brett is found shot to death on his yacht, Lainie is arrested and charged with murder. She persuades Hope to represent her even as, we later learn, she commits the first legal sin, lying to her lawyer. From mansions to shacks and yacht club to sleazy venues for lingerie "models," McBain gives us a tour of Gulf Coast Florida that's seldom grand. Unable to reach his usual investigators (the main subplot has PI Warren Chambers urging his colleague Toots Kiley to kick her crack cocaine habit cold turkey), Hope hires 60-something Guthrie Lamb, an old-style PI with major male chauvinist traits. McBain, as he has for more than 40 years, keeps his readers riveted through this entire, satisfying tale.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.�