Lachlan Smith's Blog, page 6
July 20, 2015
Advance Praise for Fox is Framed
July 2, 2015
Willmar Bookworld Event
Lachlan Smith will sign copies of Fox is Framed at Bookworld in the Kandi Mall on Friday, July 10 from 2:30-5:30 PM. Smith, a 1996 graduate of Willmar Senior High, is the author of the Leo Maxwell series of mystery novels, which combine the elements of classic hardboiled PI novels with the courtroom thriller. Smith’s novels are published by Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic. Fox is Framed is the third book in the series.
Smith won great critical acclaim for his first novel in the Leo Maxwell series, Bear Is Broken, winner of the Shamus Award for Best First P.I. novel and a Kirkus Reviews best book of the year. William Bernhardt called it “one of the best debuts I’ve read in years.” The second Leo Maxwell mystery, Lion Plays Rough, continued the story, and now, in the utterly suspenseful Fox Is Framed, Smith confronts anew the drama that has haunted Leo—and his recently brain-damaged elder brother, Teddy—since childhood.
Faced with evidence of stunning prosecutorial misconduct, a San Francisco judge has ordered a new trial for the Maxwell brothers’ father, Lawrence, who was convicted of killing their mother twenty-one years before. A prison snitch soon turns up dead, with Lawrence the only suspect, and Leo teams up with hotshot attorney Nina Schuyler to defend Lawrence against murder charges both old and new. Working the streets while Nina handles the action in the courtroom, Leo is forced to confront the darkness at the center of his life as he follows a trail of corruption and danger that leads to the very steps of City Hall.
An attorney specializing in civil rights and employment law, Smith obtained his law degree from UC Berkeley. He is also a former Richard Scowcroft Fellow in the Stegner Program at Stanford University, and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Cornell. Smith and his wife Sarah Moody, a 1997 Willmar graduate, live with their children in Birmingham, Alabama.
Praise for Fox Is Framed:
“The complex family dynamics that Smith explored in his earlier books only become more intriguing in his superlative third Leo Maxwell mystery … Smith is masterly in creating realistic courtroom scenes, including the subtleties of witness examination, and, even more impressively, enhances the trial with the human drama of the Maxwell family.” — Publisher’s Weekly, starred and boxed review
“Smith skillfully blends taut courtroom drama with investigative suspense as Leo Maxwell (Lion Plays Rough, 2014) finally confronts the haunting tragedy of his mother’s murder … the mystery is well played. Smith’s greatest success, however, is in his gripping telling of the story of Leo’s, Teddy’s, and Lawrence’s different struggles to find their own resolution to the tragedy that has haunted their lives.” –Booklist
“Lachlan Smith does a masterful turn in Fox Is Framed. A sharp-edged legal thriller with the deep emotional undertones of family drama and tragedy.”—Reed Farrel Coleman, New York Times bestselling author of Robert B. Parker’s Blind Spot
“This book never took me where I expected it would. The story is smart, complex, and original . . . The characters got me hooked, the legal story got me to stay, and the originality of the telling stuck with me when I was finished.”—Mystery Scene
“Engaging . . . Smith elegantly blends courtroom suspense and family misfortune without ever slipping into melodrama; the line Maxwell family members walk between innocence and guilt becomes more blurred with every step and turn of the page.”—Library Journal (starred review)
“Some of the sharpest courtroom cut-and-thrust since Presumed Innocent.”—Kirkus Reviews
June 21, 2015
Mystery Scene Loves Fox Is Framed
Mystery Scene reviewed Fox Is Framed:
“The third installment in the series featuring attorney Leo Maxwell reveals much of Leo’s backstory. It opens with ten-year-old Leo’s memory of discovering his mother’s dead body. Unlike his brother Teddy, Leo always thought his father Lawrence guilty of her murder—and indeed, his father has been in prison for it for over two decades. But his father’s case is under review for prosecutorial misconduct and it seems as though he’ll be released. Leo finds himself going, for the first time, for a jailhouse visit.
“In the hands of a lesser writer, there would be a gooey father and son reunion, a realization on the son’s part that his father was never guilty, and all would be forgiven as the reunited family walked out of prison into the happy sunshine. That’s not what happens here. This book never took me where I expected it would. The story is smart, complex, and original. It is the first Leo Maxwell book I have read and the storytelling proved to be so clear and concise I was never at a loss as to who was who or just what was going on.
“Leo learns that Lawrence has a fiancée named Dot, and that he wants Leo to tell her of his pending release. Leo reluctantly goes to meet Dot, a motorcycle-riding nurse who is not at all what Leo expected. When his father does get out, he heads to Teddy’s with Leo and Dot, where a granddaughter he’s never met awaits him. Teddy also works as a lawyer, but not in the courtroom since a recent head injury has reoriented him as a work-from-home family man. Lawrence is delighted with his granddaughter and the family reunion really got me emotionally hooked into the story.
“This is truly a legal thriller, much of it set inside a courtroom, told by someone who knows the way things work there. It’s left to the reader to interpret what’s happening, and it is almost like being a member of the jury yourself. All the while, Smith keeps the reader on edge. You hope Lawrence is innocent, but you are never really sure. And when a new crime turns up that incriminates him once again, you won’t know what to think. Smith lets you make up your own minds as he relentlessly unfurls his story, one in which every character has a little bit of heartbreak to share. The characters got me hooked, the legal story got me to stay, and the originality of the telling stuck with me when I was finished.”
Bookreporter Reviews Fox Is Framed
Bookreporter reviewed Fox is Framed:
“Lachlan Smith really has something going on here, consisting of a plot that has held up well over the course of three books and has been sustained by interesting, if occasionally quirky, characters.”
Fox Is Framed featured in Publisher’s Weekly
Publisher’s Weekly featured Fox is Framed in its “Power of Attorney” feature in the 2015 Mysteries & Thrillers Issue.
Lachlan Smith
Fox Is Framed (Mysterious, Apr.)
Smith’s Leo Maxwell series combines elements of the hardboiled PI novel with the legal thriller, alternating between the street and the courtroom; the first book, Bear Is Broken, won a Shamus Award. The relationship between Leo, his brain-damaged older brother, and their ex-con father is the heart of the series.
Priors Bear Is Broken (2013) and Lion Plays Rough (2014)
Evidence Smith’s third mystery squarely confronts Leo’s mother’s death, which was in the background in the earlier books. Although his father has been behind bars for more than 20 years for that murder, evidence of prosecutorial misconduct leads to his release and the reopening of that case.
Testimony “Too many writers make the mistake of treating courtroom scenes as mere exposition,” Smith says. “For the novel to work as a novel, these scenes have to dramatize the key conflicts of the story. The opening statement does not merely provide the reader with a summary of the facts—rather, it serves to dramatize the fears and passions of the lawyer who delivers it. Similarly, cross-examination needs to be not merely about what is said, but about the conflict between the lawyer’s desire to depict events one way and the witness’s desire to tell a different story, as well as the internal conflicts at stake for each.” (For more from Smith, see “Why I Write,” page 40.)
Lachlan Smith’s “Why I Write” Column in Publisher’s Weekly
The following appeared in Publisher Weekly’s 2015 Mysteries & Thrillers issue:
“I went to law school for bad reasons. I’d finished my M.F.A. and run through my Stegner Fellowship without landing a book contract or a teaching job, and I needed cover: more time to write, and the possibility of making a living at the end of it. I’d read John Grisham, Scott Turow, and Robert Traver, and had a foolish idea I’d learn the law, use what I’d learned to write successful legal thrillers, and never have to worry about practicing. There was also an element of irrational bargaining. Maybe if I offered up what was most important—my goal of being a full-time writer—the universe would take notice and give me what I really wanted.
“I had romantic ideas of becoming a public defender, the one job in the law that definitely doesn’t pay. (I’d have gone that route, and been very happy in it, I think, but the timing didn’t cooperate, and I ended up working in employment law, a field that similarly involves representing individuals against forces with outsize power to wreak havoc on their lives). My great good fortune in law school was discovering a more passionate engagement with criminal law than I’d any right to expect, given my conflicted motivations. At the time, this was a far luckier break than a publishing contract could have been. If I hadn’t first found a passion for practicing law, my idea of writing legal thrillers would have been a nonstarter. You can’t write cynically in exploitation of a subject that bores you and expect readers to be interested.
“Working as a student practitioner for the public defender’s office in San Francisco’s criminal courtrooms, I witnessed what seemed to me the great issues of our day powerfully dramatized in a forum that shares much with the theatrical stage. In court, I was lucky to find what I’d thought I was looking for, a new form in which to tell the stories I’d come to care about telling so that readers might actually want to read them. I also found a cause to which I might devote myself with tangible results, while making a positive difference for others. I was saved from the banality of the semiautobiographical “literary” fiction I’d previously attempted. And I’d found people who needed my help, in a profession that allowed me to channel my storytelling impulse in a way I hadn’t realized was possible.
“Trying cases before juries has taught me vital lessons for writing fiction. I’ve learned to write directly to the reader in the same way I’ve learned to address my courtroom performance directly to jurors, imagining myself from their perspectives to gauge the impact of everything I say and do. On the flip side, my experience writing novels has been a considerable asset to me in the courtroom, where the best storyteller usually wins.
“I went to law school because I thought, naïvely but I hope correctly, that knowing the law would help me write convincing legal thrillers. I’m glad to say that life has come full circle, that I now write legal thrillers because I’m stimulated, fascinated, and engaged by the practice of law.”
Lachlan Smith is the Shamus Award winning author of the Leo Maxwell series of legal thrillers from Grove/Atlantic’s Mysterious imprint. Fox Is Framed, the third book in the series, comes out on April 7.
Mystery Scene Loves Fox Is Framed
“The third installment in the series featuring attorney Leo Maxwell reveals much of Leo’s backstory. It opens with ten-year-old Leo’s memory of discovering his mother’s dead body. Unlike his brother Teddy, Leo always thought his father Lawrence guilty of her murder—and indeed, his father has been in prison for it for over two decades. But his father’s case is under review for prosecutorial misconduct and it seems as though he’ll be released. Leo finds himself going, for the first time, for a jailhouse visit.
“In the hands of a lesser writer, there would be a gooey father and son reunion, a realization on the son’s part that his father was never guilty, and all would be forgiven as the reunited family walked out of prison into the happy sunshine. That’s not what happens here. This book never took me where I expected it would. The story is smart, complex, and original. It is the first Leo Maxwell book I have read and the storytelling proved to be so clear and concise I was never at a loss as to who was who or just what was going on.
“Leo learns that Lawrence has a fiancée named Dot, and that he wants Leo to tell her of his pending release. Leo reluctantly goes to meet Dot, a motorcycle-riding nurse who is not at all what Leo expected. When his father does get out, he heads to Teddy’s with Leo and Dot, where a granddaughter he’s never met awaits him. Teddy also works as a lawyer, but not in the courtroom since a recent head injury has reoriented him as a work-from-home family man. Lawrence is delighted with his granddaughter and the family reunion really got me emotionally hooked into the story.
“This is truly a legal thriller, much of it set inside a courtroom, told by someone who knows the way things work there. It’s left to the reader to interpret what’s happening, and it is almost like being a member of the jury yourself. All the while, Smith keeps the reader on edge. You hope Lawrence is innocent, but you are never really sure. And when a new crime turns up that incriminates him once again, you won’t know what to think. Smith lets you make up your own minds as he relentlessly unfurls his story, one in which every character has a little bit of heartbreak to share. The characters got me hooked, the legal story got me to stay, and the originality of the telling stuck with me when I was finished.”
BOOKREPORTER Reviews Fox Is Framed
February 21, 2015
Star from Library Journal for Fox is Framed
Library Journal Gives Fox Is Framed a Starred Review
“Convinced for most of his life that his father, Lawrence, murdered his mother, San Francisco attorney Leo Maxwell finds it difficult to accept the idea that Lawrence might be innocent, let alone that he might get out of prison after more than 20 years. In Smith’s engaging third courtroom drama, Leo and his fellow attorney brother, Teddy, still on the mend after being shot in the head during the tumultuous events of 2013’s Bear Is Broken, work together to exonerate their father, who is grudgingly granted a new trial by the state. Things seem to be going their way, particularly since many of the prosecution’s original witnesses—and the underhanded prosecutor himself—are dead, and no physical evidence remains for DNA testing. Then a newly discovered jailhouse snitch winds up dead. With Lawrence the prime suspect, Leo once again is questioning his father’s innocence and digging into a case with consequences more dangerous and far-reaching than he ever imagined. VERDICT Smith elegantly blends courtroom suspense and family misfortune without ever slipping into melodrama; the line Maxwell family members walk between innocence and guilt becomes more blurred with every step and turn of the page.”
