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What more can you say about Steve Cavanagh that I haven't already said about all his books , notably the Eddie Flynn thrillers , and which should anyway be abundantly evident to any reader? He writes unputdownable thrillers with strong characters, racing plots with clever twists, his writing clear and direct, the plotting never (ok, rarely) resorting to improbable coincidences. Subtlety sometimes takes a back seat, but it's hardly a necessity when you can push the dramatic buttons to maximum effect. Evidently, all of that implies thrilling entertainment. All the above holds true for all Cavanagh's work and essentially it holds true of Kill For Me Kill For You .  Kill for Me Kill for You starts of by laying out two separate (for now) cases. In one, Amanda White is planning revenge on taking revenge on Wallace Crone, the man she believes is responsible for the abduction and murder of her daughter and by extension causing the suicide of her husband. There is however no eviden...

Steve Cavanagh took his maverick New York lawyer Eddie Flynn out of his comfort zone in his previous book, The Devil's Advocate . Not everyone was convinced about the way he almost single-handedly dealt a blow to the institutionalised racism of a small Alabama community, but I thought it was still a thrilling edge-of-the-seat ride. With The Accomplice Eddie Flynn is back on familiar ground, in New York dealing with a criminal court case in his own irreverent fashion. Maybe a little too familiar ground is covered here, but with Steve Cavanagh you can be sure to expect plenty of surprises along the way. The current case he is involved with might not be the biggest case of his career - each respective case has certainly lived up to that billing so far - but it's only one step removed from it. An utterly fearsome serial killer known as the Sandman has been terrorising the city, mutilating bodies, removing the eyes from his victims and filling their empty sockets with sand. The pol...

There is not a lot of nuance in Steve Cavanagh's latest Eddie Flynn thriller, but it's true that as far as the law and morality are concerned, good and evil acts should be clearly defined. While it seems a little heavy-handed then, there's certainly no getting away from the fact that this makes for a rivetting good read, the opening chapters of The Devil's Advocate hitting with maximum impact. Beginning with a tense scene describing an Alabama DA getting off on a likely innocent man getting fried on the electric chair, there is no subtlety or ambiguity about the position of Randal Korn of Sunville County being anything less than pure evil. He even permeates a scent "as if the man was rotting from the inside out". On the other side of the coin we have New York lawyer Eddie Fynn, who if you haven't read the previous novels in the series, is a criminal lawyer who upholds the utmost standards of fairness in matters of justice and the law. As a former con man ...

If you’ve read any of his Eddie Flynn thrillers ( The Defence , The Plea , The Liar , Thirteen ), you probably don’t need anyone to convince you of Steve Cavanagh’s brilliance as a courtroom drama crime writer, but it’s going to be immediately apparent to anyone else who reads even the first 10 pages of his latest book Fifty Fifty . You can rely on Cavanagh to have you hooked from the get-go, and not just hooked but racing through the remainder of the 350 pages of this particular book with the added incentive that it looks like being a Eddie Flynn thriller like no other. The situation is clearly, concisely and grippingly laid out in those first 10 pages. Eddie Flynn, street con-artist turned high-flying but irreverent lawyer who nonetheless has considerably more integrity than the rest of his profession, is dealing with one of the most intriguing and difficult cases of his career. Or at least since the last one anyway, which was also the trial of the century, I believe. And yet the jur...

When I read Steve Cavanagh’s last Eddie Flynn novel I noted how the author always managed to continually raise the stakes and see them. The ride he took us on in Thirteen was incredible and looked forward to the next one, confident that he could take it even further, even if I couldn’t imagine how. Well, one way you could look at Twisted is that Cavanagh has pulled back, writing his first standalone thriller outside the Eddie Flynn series. The other way of looking at it is that he’s raised the stakes again by blindsiding expectations and heading in a different direction. He certainly knows how to keep the reader on their toes. Anyone who knows a Steve Cavanagh thriller knows that it’s all about the twist. Maybe not all about the twist, because he takes the reader on an amazing ride before they get there. In a novel called Twisted , well he’s obviously going to pull out all the stops and you better believe he carries it off. The twist in Twisted is that the twist comes at the start an...

Continually upping the stakes is something you would have come to expect in Steve Cavanagh’s fast moving Eddie Flynn courtroom dramas, but somehow he even manages to raise expectations from book to book and still delivers on them. Somehow he also manages to do that without losing credibility (or at least not stretching it any further than it already is) which considering the nature of the high drama in his books must make each of them a hard act to follow. Thirteen may be unlucky for some, but not for readers of Cavanagh’s Eddie Flynn series . Maybe not so great for Eddie though, for wouldn’t you know it, just as he seems to be getting his life, career and family back together after quite a few knocks and setbacks along the way, he gets smashed in the face again; literally and metaphorically. Eddie’s quick-thinking actions in the courtroom hasn’t gone unnoticed, nor his ability to turn around seemingly impossible trials, pulling out witnesses and exert testimonies like a magician pull...

There's one person you don't want to target with if you're a criminal and thinking about kidnapping a child and ransoming her for 10 million bucks. Well, one person apart from former hustler turned lawyer and all-round action hero Eddie Flynn, who rescued his own daughter from the hands of the Russian mafia in Steve Cavanagh's first novel The Defence . Apart from Eddie Flynn though, there's one other person whose child it would be better not to try to kidnap and that's the guy who runs a multinational business operation that specalises in dealing with kidnap and ransom negotiations with everyone from from Somalian pirates to Al Quaeda terrorists and South American crime cartels. Any yet in The Liar , Cavanagh's third Eddie Flynn case, someone has indeed kidnapped the daughter of security businessman Lenny Howell. Something clearly doesn't add up here. But then if you've read any of Steve Cavanagh's Eddie Flynn books , you'll come across a lot...

" Innocent or guilty. Either way Eddie Flynn is a dead man " - the fate of Steve Cavanagh's conman-hustler turned lawyer is emblazoned on the cover of the advance proof copy of The Plea . The prologue even describes how dire the situation is for Flynn as a bullet rips through his body from an unidentified killer. There's no way out surely, and it looks like it's going to be a short run for Steve Cavanagh's quick-thinking court-storming lawyer in only his second outing. Or so you would think if you hadn't seen Flynn escape from even more impossible situations in Cavanagh's debut Flynn case, The Defence . The question - as it tends to be at the end of just about every short chapter of The Plea - is how is he going to get out of the latest impossible situation this time? Cavanagh is a master of the dangling cliffhanger, and undoubtedly a good poker player. He'll know when he can bluff the reader and get away with it - a client will say " I kille...