Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

*Starred Review* Lawyer Herbie Fisher is getting squeezed on all sides. Years after winning a $3 million lottery and being mentored by multimillionaire lawyer Stone Barrington, he's turned his life around and become the youngest-ever senior partner at a prestigious Manhattan law firm. Now Herbie has loan-shark Mario Payday after him for a $90,000 marker, a debt he paid but neglected to get the supporting paperwork, and mobster Tommy Taperelli demanding that Herbie negotiate a plea deal in a drug charge against a councilman's son, a case just tossed to Herbie by a colleague on the lam. And Herbie's fiancée, Yvette Walker, is actually a hooker working a con devised by her lowlife criminal boyfriend. Payday's goons hang Herbie by his heels out an eighth-floor window for a start, while Taperelli's henchmen take to kidnapping to make their point. And although Barrington and Police Commissioner Dino Bacchetti have Herbie's back, Herbie is known to go rogue. In their second collaboration, after Smooth Operator (2016), Woods and Hall have crafted a fast-moving tale with a light touch, its trail of bad-guy bodies aside. Crime fiction doesn't get much more entertaining than this.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2017 Booklist

Publishers Weekly
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New York lawyer Herbie Fisher, the hard-luck hero of this cleverly plotted comic thriller from Edgar-winner Woods and Hall (Smooth Operator), gets called in at the last minute to defend David Ross, a college kid accused of selling drugs at a party near Columbia University. David is the son of a New York City councilman who incurred the wrath of a ruthless real estate developer by refusing to approve a height variance for one of the mogul's buildings. The case against David is meant to send a message to the council- man from the developer. David refuses to accept the plea deal he's under pressure to take, because he's innocent. Meanwhile, a loan shark who believes that Herbie owes him $90,000 is getting impatient. Stone Barrington, Woods's main series lead, lends minimal support as Herbie manages to stumble his way to the exciting, satisfying climax. The courtroom scenes are convincing, and a host of inept crooks will resonate with fans of Donald Westlake's caper novels. Agent: Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Perennial bestseller Woods and veteran Hall, who've already teamed up to spin a yarn starring Teddy Fay, the ex-CIA operative gone spectacularly rogue (Smooth Operator, 2016), give New York attorney Stone Barrington's rising-star partner and former client Herbie Fisher a case of his own.Not that it's really Herbie's case. He's just the lawyer at Woodman Weld who answers the phone when his colleague James Glick, stricken with appendicitis, is looking for someone, anyone, to take his place in the courtroom and appear on behalf of David Ross, a pre-law student at Columbia caught at a party with a pocketful of cocaine, whose father, a city councilman, has arranged a sweetheart plea bargain that will keep his son out of jail. The plea bargain is authentic, but the appendicitis isn't: Glick's desperate to get out from under the demand that he lose the case pronto so that David will go to jail, where vengeful real estate mogul Jules Kenworth can use his vulnerable position to keep putting pressure on the councilman. And the kid, insisting that he's innocent, refuses to take the deal. So Herbie, who thought he'd be spending 10 minutes in court, ends up cross-examining witnesses whose testimonies he knows nothing about and, in the process, mightily, though unwittingly, angering Tommy Taperelli, the fixer Kenworth has engaged to ensure a guilty verdict. Dazed and confused, Herbie can hardly wait to return to his Park Avenue penthouse to spend some quality time with his fiancee, Yvette Walker, an actress out of the Yale Drama School. Now if only Yvette weren't really a call girl up to her neck in a scheme to fleece Herbie and leave him at the altar holding the bag. The weightless style is Woods', but the smartly engineered complications involving multiple malefactors who plot at serenely oblivious cross-purposes are right out of Hall's stories about sad-sack private eye Stanley Hastings. Woods, who's often mysteriously immune to plotting, may have found the perfect partner. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.