Synopses & Reviews
It's hard being Lillian Belle Rosemary Cleary. And if I didn't know that already, Bonita, my legal secretary supreme and secondary therapist, kept reminding me.
"Carita," she said, shaking her head and handing me the pink highlighter at my hyperventilated request so that I could mark another obscure legal point I needed to memorize for my upcoming appellate argument. "You make this so much more difficult than it needs to be."
So spank me, I'm a lawyer and complicating things at a high hourly rate is my specialty.
Sometimes being a lawyer sucks. That's what Lilly Cleary thinks. Lilly is tough-as-nails attorney who works for a big firm in Sarasota, Florida, and an obsessive-compulsive health nut who has a bad habit of tripping over dead bodies. This time out she's got her hands full with a psychic client and a Nazi-next-door neighbor, when an obnoxious partner in her firm is murdered. Somehow Lilly gets dragged into investigating and encounters a world-class assortment of weirdo suspects, all of whom have good reason to want to knock the guy off.
Review
“Matturro has an authentic charmer in Lilly.” Kirkus Reviews
Review
“A smart legal mystery.” New York Times Book Review
Review
“A circus of neurotic characters and cheating lawyers who meet over a murder. Funny stuff.” Sacramento Bee
Synopsis
Florida attorney Lillian Belle Cleary talks tough, loves tofu, fears toxins, and obsessively hates a mess. Having to deal with a psychic client and a Nazi neighbor is bad enough. Now she's got two dead bodies cluttering up her life -- one mired in the Sarasota swamplands, and another mauled by a vineyard harvesting machine. But it's the not-so-shocking murder of one of her firm's most hated partners that really gets her pro-active.
The cops think she's hiding something -- or worse -- so Lilly figures it's up to her to find the root that connects a trio of corpses, and to pick a murderer out of a healthy crop of wacko suspects. But her investigative endeavors may end up bearing very bitter fruit indeed, now that a deadly human predator is moving in for the kill.
About the Author
The winner of the first prize in the SEAK Inc. fiction contest, Claire Hamner Matturro is a former appellate attorney and former member of the writing faculty at Florida State University College of Law. She divides her time between Florida and Georgia.