Showing results by author "William Deverell" in All Categories

Lawyer Arthur Beauchamp is facing the most explosive trial of his career: the defence of seven boisterous environmentalists accused of sabotaging an Ontario plant that pumps out a pesticide that has led to the mass death of honeybees. The story zigzags between Toronto, where the trial takes place, and Arthur’s West Coast island home, where he finds himself arrested for fighting his own environmental cause: the threatened destruction of a popular park. The Toronto trial concludes with a tense, hang-by-the-fingernails jury verdict.   

An extremist warlord is about to unleash the world's deadliest shock troops. The Rotkommando - a fusion army of expert terrorists, political fanatics, and psychotic killers armed with a fail-save masterplan. Codeword... Mecca.

Now the Rotkommando is poised on the brink of a crazed kamikaze mission to nuke Israel and ignite World War III. Only three people on Earth have the power to stop them: a burned-out poet with delusions of grandeur, a devout nymphomaniac with a taste for blood, and a desert guru who communes with camels.

Arthur Beauchamp, a heralded criminal lawyer, has moved to a quiet island off the British Columbia coast. While trying to recover from a marriage gone sour, his retirement is interrupted by his former law partners - they want Arthur to take charge of the defense trial of Jonathan O'Donnell, the acting dean of a law school. O'Donnell has been accused of rape by one of the students, Kimberley Martin, a smart but arrogant woman who is engaged to a rich businessman.

Arthur P. Besterman, criminal lawyer and reformed alcoholic, was the first to go. Counsel to Vancouver's assorted shifters and grifters, Besterman almost always lost his cases. But a recent victory defending a low-life client might be a clue as to why he was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. Then someone takes a pot shot at philandering lawyer Brian Pomeroy after he successfully defends a group of highly controversial eco-terrorists. And so the pattern begins.

In 1962, Arthur Beauchamp is about to undertake his first murder trial. His defendant is Gabriel Swift, a politically active young aboriginal accused of killing Professor Dermot Mulligan, a former mentor to both men. Arthur becomes increasingly convinced that the police evidence against Gabriel is not only flimsy, but suspiciously convenient in a system - and a society - with entrenched racist assumptions. But as the case progresses, Arthur develops an uncomfortable sense that Gabriel is not telling him the whole truth. And to make matters worse, the green young lawyer is up against a wily veteran of the courts and a clever but biased judge. Five decades later, Arthur remains haunted by the case. Finally, he is compelled to emerge from retirement to try to complete what he began all those years ago. He must pass through some murky and long-repressed personal territory along the way, but the journey ultimately offers hope for the peace of redemption.

Deverell's powerful novel centers on the harrowing confrontation between a brilliant prosecutor on the edge of pesonal disaster, and his quarry, Dr. Au, a man whose bizarre and bloody acts are the ultimate expression of evil. Here are the people connected with Vancouver's criminal world - the prostitutes, pushers, hit-men, and the undercover police. In pursuit of survival in a world pervaded by corruption, they are motivated by their own private obsessions, and find themselves linked in unusual and unexpected ways.

From Colombia to a hidden cove in Newfoundland, modern day Robin Hood Peter Kerrivan and his ship of merry men are tracked by a NASA satellite, set up by the cop who couldn't bring him to ground, RCMP Inspector Harold Mitchell. But has Mitchell gone too far? He's hired unscrupulous ex-CIA Rudy Meyers... who needs big bucks to fund his Cuban reinvasion force.

It is 20 below in Montreal, and for the first time in 25 years detective Kellen O’Reilly is going to pieces. Flashbacks frequently take him back to the psychiatric clinic of Coldhaven Manor and the terrifying experiments of Dr. Gregor Satorius.