Outwitting Trolls (Brady Coyne Series #25) Book

Brady Coyne is a Boston attorney who focuses on a few private clients and the legal drudgery of their everyday life, which leads to a generally unexciting life. Brady, however, gets a call from an old friend and former neighbor—a man from his past as a happily married man. When Brady was married and living in suburbia, Ken Nichols was his happily married neighbor. Both marriages fell apart years ago and Brady moved to Boston while Ken Nichols moved to Baltimore. Now a decade later and in Boston for a conference, Ken contacts Brady for a get-together and a drink. It’s an uneventful evening but the next day Brady gets a call from Nichols’ ex-wife. She’s standing in her ex’s hotel room, Nichols is lying dead on the floor of his room and she needs Brady’s help.

But this savage murder is only the first and Brady is soon trying to find the connection between these long ago friends and the savage murders dogging their family.

Publishers Weekly

Family secrets and emotional hangups dominate the comfortably satisfying 25th and final Brady Coyne novel from Tapply (1940-2009). When Sharon Nichols finds her veterinarian ex-husband, Ken, stabbed to death in a suburban Boston hotel room, she phones Brady, a former neighbor of the couple, who rushes to the scene. As Sharon's lawyer, Brady tries to redirect police suspicion away from his client by exploring the victim's entanglement in selling date-rape drugs while juggling bad debts. To put it mildly, Brady discovers that Ken and Sharon had a less than idyllic personal life. While trying to help the emotionally fragile Sharon hold herself together, Brady must also sort out his prickly relationship with his son and cope with the moods of his own current lover. Convincing characters and a pleasant New England setting enhance a genuine play-fair mystery, despite several false leads. (Nov.)