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Summary
Summary
"Scottoline knows the simple yet magical secret at the heart of compelling suspense fiction." -- Philadelphia Inquirer
In the sixth riveting thriller in #1 bestselling author Lisa Scottoline's Rosato & Associates series, a lawyer is handed the case that could make her career--and jeopardize her life.
Judy Carrier takes the case of her career to defend Anthony Lucia, fondly known as "Pigeon Tony," who freely admits to killing his lifelong enemy in order to settle a personal vendetta. Her client's guilt, however, is only the beginning of Judy's problems. The victim's family wants revenge and is determined to finish off Pigeon Tony and Judy before the case goes to trial. Then there's Pigeon Tony's hunky grandson, who makes Judy think about everything but the law.
In a case steeped in blood and memory, it will take brains and a lot of luck to save Pigeon Tony. But if anyone will see justice done, it's this gutsy girl who will risk everything to win--including her life.
Author Notes
Lisa Scottoline was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 1, 1955. She received a B.A. in English with a concentration in the contemporary American novel from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976 and graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1981. Before becoming an author, she worked as a trial lawyer.
Her first novel, Everywhere That Mary Went, was published in 1994. Her other books include Come Home, Keep Quiet, Every Fifteen Minutes, and Most Wanted. She also writes the Rosato and Associates series and the Rosato and Dinunzio Novel series.
Lisa's title, Daddy's Girl, is a April 2016 New York Times bestseller.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Is it murder or simply eye-for-an-eye justice if you kill someone who has killed members of your family? That moral conundrum lies at the heart of Scottoline's (Moment of Truth; Mistaken Identity) latest legal yarn, which gives top billing to yet another lawyer from the all-female Philadelphia firm of Rosato & Associates. The star here is the somewhat manic Judy Carrier, who has played supporting roles in the past. The story, however, revolves around Anthony "Pigeon Tony" Lucia, a lovable septuagenarian who killed his longtime rival, Angelo Coluzzi, who murdered Lucia's wife in their native Italy 60 years ago. Coluzzi, the wealthy, mob-connected owner of a big construction firm, always seems to get the upper hand until Pigeon Tony breaks his neck during a showdown at the pigeon-racing club where they're both members. Pigeon Tony freely admits he killed Coluzzi, but maintains he was justified because of the long-standing Italian tradition of vendetta; Carrier knows it will be a big stretch to make that argument fly before a 21st-century American jury. Aided, however, by Tony's many friends in South Philly's Italian neighborhoods, Carrier mounts a sparkling defense while dodging innumerable attempts on her life from Coluzzi's gang and trying to keep in check her amorous feelings for Pigeon Tony's ruggedly handsome grandson, Frank. Scottoline shows once again her knack for building a highly entertaining plot around an intriguingly simple legal issue and a cast of likable eccentrics. Her touch is light, and her satisfying mix of mischief, sex appeal, action and legal analysis justifies her wide following. (Feb. 27) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The latest criminal defendant for Bennie Rosato's all-female law firm (Moment of Truth, 2000, etc.) is an elderly Italian-American who's killed another elderly Italian-American with his bare hands. Moreover, insists Tony Lucia, he'd meant to kill Angelo Coluzzi; he was happy to kill him; after all, Angelo had had it coming to him for 60 years, ever since he'd murdered Tony's bride Silvana back in Italy after she left him for Tony, and Angelo's fellow-Blackshirts declined to prosecute him despite Tony's howls of rage. But Tony hasn't just been nursing an ancient grievance, he tells his lawyer, Judy Carrier; he'd struck out at Angelo after his old enemy had gloated that the deaths of Tony's son and his wife last year in a fiery car crash were no accident, because Angelo himself had been nursing his own grudge against gentle pigeon-breeder Tony. But although vendettas may be a fact of death back in Palermo, they can't be used to justify homicide in Philadelphia. So Judy, aided by Tony's sexy stonecutter grandson Frank, hunkers down to the impossible task of digging up exculpatory evidence. At the same time, she sees no harm in continuing the vendetta she can't drag into court by launching a brace of civil suits against Coluzzi Constructiontossing in another suit against Angelo's son John for planting a bomb under her car. It's not until she's succeeded in setting John Coluzzi against his brother Marco, the firm's heir apparent, that she realizes she's trapped herself in the crossfire, and she'll have to go back to court in search of the legal victory that will clear the way for her romance with Frank Luciaa victory that would have looked a lot less anticlimactic a hundred pages earlier. Generously plotted and emotionally wide-ranging, though readers less dewy-eyed than Judy will see cracks in the structure that a pro like Frank would never let by.
Library Journal Review
Lawyer Judy Carrier gets more than she bargained for when she defends an elderly Italian pigeon keeper who freely admits to having murdered because of a generations-old vendetta. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Vendetta Defense Chapter One The morning Tony Lucia killed Angelo Coluzzi, he was late to feed his pigeons. As long as Tony had kept pigeons, which was for almost all of his seventy-nine years, he had never been late to feed them, and they began complaining the moment he opened the screen door. Deserting their perches, cawing and cooing, they flew agitated around the cages, their wings pounding against the chicken wire, setting into motion the air in the tiny city loft. It didn't help that the morning had dawned clear and that March blew hard outside. The birds itched to fly. Tony waved his wrinkled hand to settle them, but his heart wasn't in it. They had a right to their bad manners, and he was a tolerant man. It was okay with him if the birds did only one thing, which was to fly home. They were homers, thirty-seven of them, and it wasn't an easy job they had, to travel to a place they'd never been, a distance in some races of three hundred or four hundred miles, then to navigate their return through skies they'd never flown, over city and country they'd never seen and couldn't possibly know, to flap their way home to a tiny speck in the middle of South Philadelphia, all without even stopping to congratulate themselves for this incredible feat, one that man couldn't even explain, much less accomplish. There were so many mistakes a bird could make. Circling too long, as if it were a joyride or a training toss. Getting distracted on the way, buffeted by sudden bad weather, or worse, simply getting tired and disoriented -- thousands of things could result in the loss of a precious bird. Even once the first bird had made it home, the race wasn't won. Many races had been lost by the bird who wouldn't trap fast enough; the one who was first to reach his loft but who stopped on the roof, dawdling on his way to the trap, so that his leg band couldn't be slipped off and clocked in before another man's bird. But Tony's birds trapped fast. He bred them for speed, intelligence, and bravery, through six and even seven generations, and over time the birds had become his life. It wasn't a life for the impatient. It took years, even decades, for Tony to see the results of his breeding choices, and it wasn't until recently that his South Philly loft had attained the best record in his pigeon-racing club. Suddenly the screen door banged open, blown by a gust of wind, startling Tony and frightening the birds in the first large cage. They took panicky wing, seventeen of them, all white as Communion wafers, transforming their cage into a snowy blizzard of whirring and beating, squawking and calling. Pinfeathers flurried and snagged on the chicken wire. Tony hurried to the loft door, silently reprimanding himself for being so careless. Normally he would have latched the screen behind him -- the old door had bowed in the middle, warped with the rain, and wouldn't stay shut without the latch -- but this morning, Tony's mind had been on Angelo Coluzzi. The white pigeons finally took their perches, which were small plywood boxes lining the walls, but in their panic they had displaced each other, violating customary territories and upsetting altogether the pecking order, which led to a final round of fussing. "Mi dispiace." Tony whispered to the white birds. I'm sorry, in Italian. Though Tony understood English, he preferred Italian. As did his birds, to his mind. He gazed at the white pigeons, really doves, which he found so beautiful. Large and healthy, the hue of their feathers so pure Tony marveled that only God could make this color. Their pearliness contrasted with the inky roundness of their eye, which looked black but in fact was the deepest of reds, blood-rich. Tony even liked their funny bird feet, with the flaky red scales and the toe in back with a talon as black as their eyes pretended to be. And he kidded himself into thinking that the doves behaved better than the other birds. More civilized, they seemed aware of how special they were. The secret reason for the doves' special status was that they were beloved of his son, who had finally stopped Tony from releasing them at weddings for a hundred fifty dollars a pop. Tony had thought it made a good side business; why not make some money to pay for the seed and medicines, plus keep the birds in shape during the off-season? And it made Tony happy to see the brides, whose hearts lifted at the flock of doves taking off outside the church, since you couldn't throw rice anymore. It reminded his heart of his own wedding day, less grand than theirs, though such things didn't matter when it came to love. But his son had hated the whole idea. They're not trained monkeys, Frank had said. They're athletes. So Tony had relented. "Mi displace," he whispered again, this time to his son. But Tony couldn't think about Frank now. It would hurt too much, and he had birds to feed. He shuffled down the skinny aisle, and his old sneakers, their soles worn flat, made a swishing sound on the whitewash of the plywood floor. The floor had held up okay, unlike the screen door; Tony had built the loft himself when he first came to America from Abruzzo, sixty years ago. The loft measured thirty feet long, with the single door in the middle opening onto a skinny aisle that ran the short length of the building. It occupied all of Tony's backyard, as if the loft and yard were nesting boxes. Off the aisle of the loft were three large chicken wire cages lined with box perches . . . The Vendetta Defense . Copyright © by Lisa Scottoline. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Vendetta Defense by Lisa Scottoline All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.