Bodily Harm - The Friday 56 and Book Beginnings on Friday

I don't often read legal thrillers, but after enjoying Bodily Harm by Robert Dugoni, I've become a fan of the genre. This story kept me riveted from start to finish with its superb plot and dramatic action. Seattle attorney David Sloan (the book's hero) is a likable character, and I felt empathy for him from the very beginning. I'll be reading more books by this talented author.

To learn more about the story, read the synopsis below. Although this is the third book featuring Sloan, it stands alone. (Why can I never seem to read the first book first??) 

Book Beginning (Prologue):
     
Guangzhou, China
      It hurt to blink.
     The light stabbed at his eyes, shooting daggers of pain to the back of his skull. When he shut them an aurora of black and white spots lingered.
      Albert Payne had never been one to partake liberally in alcohol; not that he was a complete teetotaler either. He'd been hungover a handful of times during his fifty-six years, but those few occasions had been the result of unintended excess, never a deliberate intent to get drunk. So although he had little experience with which to compare it, his pounding head seemed a clear indicator that he had indeed drunk to excess. He'd have to accept that as so, because he could remember little about the prior evening.

The Friday 56 (from Page 56 of my hardback book):
     Sloane glanced from the road to the manila file on the edge of the passenger seat and wondered if Kyle Horgan had hit upon the next "It" toy. If he had, Horgan's scribbled drawings could be as valuable as a Rembrandt, according to Stroud. And that changed everything.
     Money always did.

Genre: Legal Thriller / Mystery
Length: 369 Pages (Hardback)
Amazon Link: Bodily Harm
More Books by This Author: Robert Dugoni's Website

Synopsis (from Amazon):
     Bodily Harm opens with a big win for David Sloane and his new partner, Tom Pendergrass, in a malpractice case centered on the death of a young child. But on the heels of this seeming victory, an unlikely character—toy designer Kyle Horgan— comes forward to tell Sloane that he’s gotten it all wrong: Horgan’s the one who’s truly responsible for the little boy’s death and possibly others—not the pediatrician Sloane has just proven guilty.
     Ordinarily, Sloane might have dismissed such a person as a crackpot, but something about this case has always troubled him—something that he couldn’t quite pinpoint. When Sloane tries to follow up with Horgan, he finds the man’s apartment a shambles— ransacked by unknown perpetrators. Horgan has vanished without a trace. Together with his longtime investigative partner Charles Jenkins, Sloane reexamines his clients’ son’s death and digs deeper into Horgan’s claims, forcing him to enter the billion-dollar, cutthroat toy industry. As Sloane gets closer to the truth, he trips a wire that leads to a shocking chain of events that nearly destroys him.
     To get to the bottom of it all and find justice for the families harmed, Sloane must keep in check his overwhelming desire for revenge. Full of nail-bitingly tense action scenes as well as edge-of-your-seat courtroom drama, Bodily Harm finds Robert Dugoni at the very top of his game.
                             
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