Angle of Impact Book

After winning a major case in LA, high-powered Philadelphia lawyer Dana Svensson is returning home, eager for a long-overdue family vacation. Barely off the interstate, her client Vic Sullivan, President of Pensteel, calls her from his company's helicopter to rehash the highlights of the trial. Suddenly, their conversation breaks up and, in the distance, Dana sees a mid-air explosion.

Dana Svensson has suddenly become the "woman who knows too much." Plunged into a series of breath-stopping events that put her entire family in danger, Dana must use all her skill to find out what's going on before it's too late. Delivering deft plot twists and an in-depth knowledge of legal chicaneries, Angle of Impact is a legal thriller that is more than a little different from all the rest.

Publishers Weekly

Wild improbability and cardboard characters mar this legal thriller from MacDougal (Breach of Trust), which features a heroine who has trained herself to be "as insensitive as any man." Workaholic law partner Dana Svenssen, a leggy blonde "Valkyrie" pushing 40 but "an eyecatcher still," is on her car phone with the president of Pennsteel corporation when his helicopter crashes. She races to the scene of the accident, a Pennsylvania amusement park where, coincidentally, her own prepubescent daughters are recreating with their day camp. There she discovers that the client's JetRanger has mysteriously collided with a light plane: all five air passengers are dead, and seven others are killed on the ground when the wreckage suddenly explodes. After briskly confirming that her girls are unharmed, Dana cancels vacation plans in order to defend her corporate client's not-so-deep pockets. But this is no ordinary day at the office for Dana: her home and car are burglarized, then her mopey, writer's-blocked husband vanisheskidnapped, she soon learns, by some shadowy group with ties to the accident. Meanwhile, Dana finds herself swept into a torrid affair with a "dimpled and devilish" accident reconstructionist some 10 years her junior. ("Suddenly she understood how a million men must have felt before her. I've worked so hard, and I've given so much. This is my reward.") Between over-the-top action sequences, MacDougal shows a flair for interoffice intrigue (and even delivers a few zingers on lawyers' staffing and billing procedures). But Dana's self-absorbed machisma is unappealing, sometimes even creepy, and many of the secondary characters are paper-thin, particularly her daughters, surely the most compliant preteens on the planet. (Apr.)