Insider Justice

A TOY TO KILL FORCelebrated criminal lawyer Marc Kadella takes on the fall-out of a class action suit against a beloved corporate toy company gone wrong—and ends up falling down a rabbit hole of insider trading, sex scandal, political corruption, and murder, in the eighth page-turner of the Marc Kadella legal mystery series. Like most investors, venture capitalist Cal Simpson has his fingers in … capitalist Cal Simpson has his fingers in many a financial pie. There’s cutting edge war plane procurement, state-of-the-art toy manufacturing, and the occasional affair with the right politician (to name a few). Some call him a shady Wall Street kinda guy. Others know him to be a tyrant—a mastermind with puppets intricately connected by a billion dollar string.

One of his pet projects is the newest Cannon Brothers toy—a motorized skateboard for kids as young as 10 that takes the marketplace by storm, until it blows up—literally. Seems its Chinese manufacturer has installed lithium batteries that overheat the braking system, sometimes causing it to explode—leaving 24 kids dead and 500 injured. But the bigger problem is just as sinister: the small pool of people with insider knowledge of the defect are beginning to disappear…

First there’s Irving Haraldson, a company engineer who discovered the defect before release and brought it to management with a furrowed brow. He was told every single battery would be replaced, release date be damned. And then he was discovered behind a Minneapolis pick-up bar with 3 bullets in his head.

Then there’s the capable albeit young corporate lawyer Lynn McDaniel, who was assigned to defend Cannon Brothers in litigation. After discovering the engineer’s memo and distributing it to her boss, Zach Evans, she turns up dead in the woods en route to a 4th of July party being thrown by Zach’s father-in-law: Cal Simpson.

Zach finds himself on trial for murder, with inimitable criminal lawyer Marc Kadella in his corner—and a nagging suspicion Cal knows more than he’s let on.

A bleak and accurate portrayal of the lewd world of financial crime, where not even children are protected from the greedy and power-hungry, Insider Justice is Dennis Carstens’s most intricate murder mystery yet—a heart-racing financial thriller that reads like a delicate puzzle, and a plot that twists and turns with meticulous precision—right up to its astounding conclusion.

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