By William Lashner
William Morrow
Hardcover, Paperback and Audio Cassette (Abridged) Editions

Author William Lashner brings back Victor Carl, the Philadelphia lawyer first introduced in Hostile Witness. Carl is a down-on-his-luck attorney with a penchant for choosing clients that are either broke, associated with the mob...or both.

Past Due Excerpt There is something perversely cheerful about a crime scene in the middle of the night, the pulsating red and blue lights, the great beams of white, the strobes of photographers’ flashes. Festively festooned with yellow tape, a crime scene at night is a place cars drive slowly by, as if before an overdone Christmas display with bowing reindeers and whirling Santas. © William Lashner Published with permission

Carl is determined to find the murderer of his client, Joey Cheaps. Cheaps was involved with a waterfront murder and a missing suitcase full of money that disappeared at the same time as the head of a huge cocaine ring.

Carl’s investigation puts him at odds with a Supreme Court Justice and his eccentric wife who has recorded her life in volumes of journals that somehow hold the key to the missing criminal, a vengeful victim back from the dead. The story is full of twists and turns including Carl’s internal struggle to unshackle himself from the past.

Bookworm's Briefing
William Lashner comes close but has not hit the bull’s eye with his novel Past Due. The convoluted plot, combined with excessively long passages, make the story-line hard to follow.

Fans of Victor Carl, the central character of this series of who-done-its by Lashner, will enjoy the morally ambiguous lawyer’s struggle to figure out who murdered his client, Joey Cheaps. Carl’s foibles of being mercenary, yet moral, endear him to the reader and the first-person narration, including the attorney’s struggle to resolve his relationship with his dying father, saves the book’s otherwise confusing plot.