Customer Reviews

Bitter Truth

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"Bitter Truth" is a grand novel of epic proportions, rich in detail, complex, and long. In this, the sequel to author William Lashner's debut, "Hostile Witness", he serves up a surprisingly gothic mystery with all the trimmings: a dark and decrepit mansion - "Veritas", the wealthy family with secrets that are literally buried, hidden passageways and, of course, murder. Throw in Lashner's usual cast of south Philly mobsters and other assorted bizarre supporting characters, and this adds up to one engrossing and entertaining read.

Philadelphia lawyer Victor Carl has a history defending organized crime. He is approached by Caroline Shaw, an attractive young woman who, unbeknownst to Carl at the time, is heiress to the "Reddman" Pickle fortune. Caroline believes her sister's recent suicide was in fact a mob hit, and that she would be next. Given Car's connections to the underworld, enlists his help. Reluctant at first, but, envisioning a wrongful death law suit with millions of inheritance at stake, he eventually succumbs to greed and agrees to take the case. Carl is soon over his head in a delightfully convoluted tale of old money and old murder, deception, greed, and mayhem that span four generations and two continents. Street smart and self-depreciating, Victor Carl proves he can deal with street thugs and aristocratic bankers with equal ease. While neither fitting the mold of the competent lawyer of a Grisham novel, and certainly not the physically tough hero of a Lehane or Crais mystery, Carl is nonetheless an endearing and effective narrator.

In summary, if you like a spooky old-fashioned thriller mystery with some real skeletons in the closet, engaging characters, intelligent dialog, and don't mind investing some time, (the paperback stretches to 568 pages), "Bitter Truth" is a highly recommended read.

Victor Carl is back in this wild ride of a novel. Victor is approached by an heiress to prove that her sister did not commit suicide. Victor soon finds himself deep in a decades old mystery that involves an "old money" Philadelphia family and his "friends" from the organized crime circuit. Unpredictable, and after a slow start, this book finishes strong in a plot that can be described a "zig-zagging".

This is clearly not Lashner's best work. It took a while to get thorough, but Lashner kept me interested. This is a book that cries out for better editing. Way too many long descriptive passages that lead to yawns. The story is convoluted, but at least the main plot is interesting--just who is the evil force behind the Pickle family? And Carl is so darned interesting. I love Morris as always. I noticed that this book was called Vertias first and there was almost a 6 year lag between novels for our boy Lashner...I hope that Fatal Flaw is better. Still, because I love Philadelphia (Lasher even gets the restaurants right here) and Carl, I will read it.

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.

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.

What I found was a very pleasant surprise. Lashner weaves and winds plots, characters and dialogue in a way that makes you late for the train, miss meetings and forget to eat. This book is hard to put down.
Nothing contrived, thoroughly entertaining, nicely edited and put together. He manages to describe a scene without making it forced or boring. Just the right amount of context and atmosphere, seasoned with interesting characters.

Reading this book will force me to the bookstore to search out his other works. That is saying a lot, even for a bookhog like me.

The writing in Veritas (which apparently is called Bitter Truth now) is just as good as in Hostile Witness. The plot had great possiblilties, and was often more interesting than Hostile's plot, but it didn't quite pay off the way I had hoped. Apparently Veritas is a shortened--though still 440 long pages--version of Bitter Truth, and Bitter Truth might take its time in the ending better and be richer, I don't know. At this point, I would say that Lashner's best plot was Fatal Flaw (though not executed very well in the beginning), his best writing was Hostile Witness--when you consider the meaning of the words and the whole book, and Veritas kind of gets stuck in the middle. Almost the whole time I was reading it I thought I would call it his best book, but it didn't resolve itself quite to my satisfaction, and I don't. Bottom line: I don't think Lashner has written his best book yet--even though Hostile will define him due to the introduction of Carl. Two things are for sure, I'll keep reading Lashner's books, and there isn't anybody like him.

reviewers need to recognize this retitling of an older work

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.

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!