Violent Ward

"A blistering read . . . the guessing game continues until the final page."—Time Out

In Len Deighton's razor-sharp noir, criminal lawyer Mickey Murphy gets entangled in a complex scam and murder investigation backdropped by a riot-torn Los Angeles

Downtown Los Angeles, 1992. Mickey Murphy is a rumpled criminal defense attorney scraping by with a shabby office, an ex-wife bleeding him for money, and clients who would plead the Fifth—if only they could count that high. Mickey’s world is a precarious balance of dodgy deals and unpaid bills, and his one unrequited passion—for Ingrid, the beautiful wife of his wealthiest client, the enigmatic tycoon Zack Petrovitch—could bring it all crashing down.

When Ingrid gets Mickey entangled in an elaborate scam involving bearer bonds, false identities and frozen corpses, things spiral from bad to catastrophic. There's a murder to explain, a raft of eccentrics in the way, and the nagging suspicion that Petrovitch bought Mickey’s law firm just to torch it later.

Then the Rodney King verdict drops and Los Angeles explodes. And as the city burns, Mickey has to race to work out who's betraying whom before everything goes up in smoke.