Bitter Truth

A stained legal career spent defending mob enforcers, two-bit hoods, and other dregs of humanity has left Philadelphia lawyer Victor Carl jaded and resentful -- until a new client appears to offer him an escape and a big payday. Caroline Shaw, the desperate scion of a prominent Main Line dynasty, wants him to prove that her sister Jacqueline's recent suicide was, in fact, murder before Caroline suffers a similar fate.

It is a case that propels Carl out of his courtroom element and into a murky world of fabulous wealth, bloody family legacies, and dark secrets. Victor Carl would love nothing more than to collect his substantial fee and get out alive. But a bitter truth is dragging him in dangerously over his head, and ever closer to the shattering revelation that the most terrifying darkness of all lies not in the heart of a Central American jungle...but in the twisted soul of man.

Amazon.com Review
In Bitter Truth (previously published Veritas), William Lashner's hero, Victor Carl (last seen in Hostile Witness), is a Philadelphia lawyer who loves money as much as justice and has contacts with people of the mob persuasion. Victor's ancestors include Elmore Leonard and John Grisham. What makes him such an engaging companion is how he manages to turn all his character flaws into assets, as he looks into the murder of a very rich, very social woman and finds that there are all kinds of secret truths buried on the grounds of an old family mansion called Veritas.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Too long and too many sidetracks, 2008-09-14
Though I have much liked other William Lashner books, I didn't much like this book. It took me a long time to get through it - and only then by skimming over goodly bits of it.

For me, the main problem was that there were simply too many characters to keep track of. Maybe it is a guy-thing, but I can't follow relationships among people and families over multiple generations. That's what this book is largely about - for nearly 600 pages.

Fathers, grandfathers, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, brothers, half-brothers, half-sisters, unknown brothers, newly found brothers, murdered sisters, murdered fathers, blah, blah.

Then lots of sidebars where we read old letters and diary entries and whatever else recording the events of yesteryear which held the clues as to the murders happening today. On those pages, it seems like every 400th line holds a clue - who's got patience for that? - so I skipped most of it and went for the recap at the end.

Then as if I wasn't completely confused already, he adds time juxtapositions. From time to time, we are in the actual present with the lead character. Most of the time, we are in the recent past recounting the events leading to the present. And then for other big chunks of time, we are varyingly a few years earlier, many years earlier, and a hundred years earlier.

Basically, I couldn't follow most of it and more or less lost interest.






0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Bitter Truth, 2008-04-19
Very upset to learn this is same book previously published under title of Veritas. Don't think author's should change titles to increase book sales of same book. Watch out!


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

OK, but needs a good editor, 2007-01-11
I read a lot of hard-boiled detective fiction and legal thrillers and am always looking for new authors. When a friend recommended the Victor Carl series I immediately ordered 3 from Amazon with great anticipation. I found them OK, but not great. They are solidly in the tradition of the flawed hero/detective going down the mean streets, and getting involved in Ross MacDonald-like cases in which the past haunts the present. All that makes them pretty interesting.

However, the books are WAY too long. Lashner's editor needs to cut about 200-300 pages from each one. There's way too much of Carl's interior musings - he's just not than interesting, and interferes seriously with the plot development. To anyone familiar with the genre the actual mystery is very slowly developed and the plot holds few surprises. Some of the characters and subplots are interesting, but by the time you get to the end, the resolution has been so obvious for so long, that I find I have been skimming for about the last third of the book.

Fun to pass some time with when you're out of Crais, Connelly, Child, etc.


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

This is a retitled work from 1997, then called " Veritas ", 2006-06-08
reviewers need to recognize this retitling of an older work


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Victor Carl and the Case of the Pickle Heiress, 2006-04-14
William Lashner has written a pretty good series of books featuring Victor Carl, a Philadelphia lawyer whose desire to be utterly mercenary is often impeded by a weak but definitely present set of ethics. Bitter Truth is the second book in the series, and even if not Lashner at his best, it is still a quite enjoyable book.

As this novel starts, Victor is subsisting primarily on his fees as a reluctant mob lawyer. While a nice source of income, this role also interferes with his natural sense of self-preservation. He is retained by Caroline Shaw, heir to the Reddman Pickle Empire which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Caroline wants Victor to look into the death of her sister; although ruled a suicide, Caroline suspects mob involvement, hence her hiring of Victor. Although she is paying him a nice $10,000 fee, Victor smells much greater money, the sort that can allow him to quit lawyering and retire to some South Seas island.

Of course, such great wealth would not be easy to come by, and Victor soon finds himself in a boatload of trouble. He becomes involved with a strange little cult which is not above violence to stop Victor's investigation; more seriously, he also gets entangled in a mob war. But the key problems come from the Reddman/Shaw family itself, a clan with a closet full of skeletons. Although fabulously wealthy, the family seems to exist under a curse of death and insanity. The mansion that they are centered around is a practically Gothic haunted house; despite their vast funds, the house is in disrepair and even the food that is served is unpleasant. To earn his money, Victor will need to sort out the family secrets and unearth crimes that date back a century.

As mentioned previously, this is not Lashner's best book, but it is good. There is some intangible quality that seems to be missing from this one that prevents me from giving it a full five stars. As someone who has read the four Victor Carl books completely out of order (3, 1, 4, 2), I can confidently say that they don't need to be read in sequence and each stands alone, so if you want to start reading Lashner, this may be as good a place as any.

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