Publisher Description
When your family’s on the wrong side of the law…what side are you on?
The Ludlows are a family of fast-talking Boston lawyers, and patriarch Carl Ludlow treats his offspring like employees—which they are. Black-sheep daughter, Fina, dropped out of law school, but her father keeps her in the fold as the firm’s private investigator, working alongside her brothers.
Juggling family, business, cops and crooks is no problem for Fina. But when her sister-in-law disappears, she’s caught up in a case unlike any she’s encountered before.
Carl wants things resolved without police, but the deeper Fina digs, the more impossible that seems. As she unearths more dirt, the demands of family loyalty intensify. But she is after the truth—no matter where it lies…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What starts, in Thoft's dazzling first novel, as a missing-persons case for Boston PI Fina Ludlow the search for her sister-in-law, Melanie swells through layers of familial secrets, lies, and betrayals to something approaching Greek tragedy. The Ludlows' dysfunctionality is no secret to Fina, the lone surviving daughter and nonlawyer in this clan of high-powered ambulance-chasers, for whom she works as an in-house investigator. When Fina digs into Melanie's troubled marriage to her brother Rand, she begins to discover disturbing and dangerous links to the city's criminal underbelly, from mobster Mark Lamont to Back Bay madam Bev Duprey. Fina's two hunky friends with benefits, Det. Cristian Menendez and exotic masseur Milloy, join her on an adrenaline-pumping chase. Although Thoft tips her big bombshell too soon, readers will be eager to see more of smash-mouth Fina, a hard-boiled throwback equally comfortable shooting from the hip or the lip.
