Not Just Outside the Box. Recreating the Box.
Review by Kim Cantrell
Jack Swyteck is a Miami based attorney with a speciality in criminal defense who represents some very colorful characters.
In the newest Jack Swyteck book from author James Grippando, Jack represents yet another questionable client. This time the client, Jamal Wakefield, has just been released for lack of evidence from Guantanamo Bay but was immediately arrested on charges of attempted murder and murder in the first. As he sits in the Dade County jail, Jamal insists that he is innocent.
Nothing unusual, right? Wrong. The murder charges are the result of the death of the 16-year-old McKenna Mays, former girlfriend of Jamal, and her family’s friend, Vince Paulo; who, although he survived, is blinded in his rescue efforts.
And Vince Paulo and Jack Swyteck are friends that go back many years.
But Jack believes in his client’s innocence. Jamal adamantly claims he was being held in a Prague, Czech Republic at the time of McKenna’s murder. On the other hand, when Vince realized McKenna was dying, he managed to make a recording in which McKenna named Jamal as her killer that now sits as evidence in the District Attorney’s office.
What to do? What to do?
This is where Grippando changes things up a bit and, instead of the expected legal thriller, Afraid of the Dark becomes a spy thriller – which I typically don’t like.
Yet I loved this one! A good combination of spy stuff with a firm foundation in the legal made it A-Okay in my book!
It’s a winding, twisting plot that takes readers around the globe and through a maze filled with terrorism, CIA secrets, revenge, and runaway (and frightening) technology.
I don’t think I’ll ever surf the web, have a cell phone conversation, or watch the news again without second guessing.
Other reviewers made the comment that the book was too off-the-wall; to that I say two things: (1) It’s fiction, so it works and (2) It may not be as fictional as you think – just do a Google search.
I love fiction that really gets my brain to working overtime, so I eagerly give Afraid of the Dark by James
Grippando a thumbs up and say add it to your fiction reading list!
Afraid of the Dark is a fiction Must Read. Go get it!
