Goodbye girl

Florida defense lawyer Jack Swyteck hasn't changed much since we last saw him in 2021's Twenty. He's still a tough-as-nails crusader, and his latest case is a doozy. In a conflict that resembles the discord over ownership rights between Taylor Swift and Scooter Braun, a pop musician is embroiled in a dispute over money with her ex-husband, and to make sure her ex doesn't get a dime, she encourages her fans to pirate her music. Now the dispute has escalated. She and her ex are accusing each other in the unsolved murder of her former lover, and Jack must figure out who's telling the truth. This is the eighteenth Swyteck novel since The Pardon, and it's just as good as the rest. Grippando, who practiced law for several years before becoming a novelist, keeps coming up with complex and timely cases, and this one is first-rate.

A feud between a pop-singing phenom and her ex-husband pulls Florida lawyer Jack Swyteck into a whirlpool of murder, betrayal, and modern-day piracy. Music mogul Shaky Nichols has sued his ex, the single-named Imani, for defaming him by charging that he stole much of her back catalog when EML Records, the company he controls, simply bought the copyrights in secret. (He'd been about to present them to her as a surprise, Shaky claims, when she filed for divorce.) Even though Imani publicly accused Shaky of pirating her music and urged her zillions of fans to retaliate by pirating the recordings he owns, Jack, her lawyer, manages to get Shaky's suit dismissed without prejudice, but the trouble doesn't go away. Even worse, the trouble is linked to the corpse of Tyler McCormick, who was strangled and chained to a piling on Florida's Isola di Lolando 12 years ago. The FBI presses Imani to meet privately with Russian oligarch Vladimir Kava, whose teenage granddaughter wants a private concert, so that she can wear a wire and record him acknowledging that he and his son, Sergei, are running a global digital piracy operation. When that meeting doesn't come off as planned, Jack finds himself back in court with his unreliable client, who's charged, like her ex, with that 12-year-old murder, each co-defendant eager to throw the other under the bus. Meanwhile, Jack's agreement with his wife, FBI agent Andie Henning, that they won't discuss their jobs runs aground once again, and his former client and sometime investigator Theo Knight's trip to London suddenly casts him in the role of accessory to a kidnapping and puts him squarely in the Kavas' crosshairs. Enough eye-popping plot developments for a miniseries, which may be exactly the idea. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.