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Read Wild Justice (2001)

Wild Justice (2001)

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Genre
Series
Rating
3.8 of 5 Votes: 4
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ISBN
0061030635 (ISBN13: 9780061030635)
Language
English
Publisher
harpertorch

Wild Justice (2001) - Plot & Excerpts

Phillip Margolin, a former criminal justice attorney, brings his readers Wild Justice, where justice is never straight forward in and outside of the courtroom.A haunting massacre awaits investigators near a cabin in the woods, the "works" of a mad man, a serial killer that has taken meticulous care to make sure that each of the victims suffered. Caught on scene and arrested is a brilliant but violent and drug abusing surgeon Dr. Vincent Cardoni. Cardoni hires the top lawyer in Frank Jaffe and his daughter Amanda who is fresh out of law school. Amanda gets chills every time she encounter Cardoni and she question whether she can do this. Can she defend a man who she believes is a serial killer? Could she really help set a monster free? Amanda's concerns are taken away from her, when Cardoni disappears under strange circumstances, and everything points to Cardoni as being dead. Now four years have passed, and the murders begin again. Has Cardoni returned? If yes how did he survive, and would he be even capable of committing the murders now? So the man hunt starts, all the law enforcement agencies are searching for him and coming up dry. Then the nagging question enters everyone's minds were they wrong was Cardoni is not the killer, and the real murder has been living in their midst the whole time.This is an great book, a true psychological thriller. This book keeps you guessing to the end, with so many twist and turns you will always be second guessing who you think the killer actually is. You really get no true confirmation about who the murder is till the end of the book. There are so many good candidates for who the murderer is, which makes the book even more chilling, suspenseful and thrilling. I think that it is haunting that the book has so many options of who the killer could be, as there are clues and motives that point to all of them.Amanda is a pretty well developed character, portrayed a little too girlish for my liking as she immediately falls for an old high school crush. However, my main problem with Amanda is that she preforms duties way outside of that of a lawyer. I think Margolin was trying to make Amanda a Lawyer and an Investigator all at once. By not focusing on one title Amanda becomes a little bit of an unfocused character and in the end made me think (that in real life) she would not be a very good lawyer. This is an area where Margolin lost his focus a bit, and you think this would have been the strongest and well developed part of the book as Margolin used to be a criminal defense attorny.You do get into the head of the killer, and just see how methodical the killing was. You get to read tidbits of the of the Killer's journal that give in detail the experiments that are being preformed on the victim. (Note, some of these scenes may be hard for some readers to read they are gory and a little bit graphic so if you have problems reading this type of thing this book is not for you) I believe that the journal entries add to the overall chilling feeling (but in a good way) that you get when you read this book and they add to the suspense and plot, as you really know why the right killer needs to be caught.This was the first book that I have read by Margolin and it will not be the last especially in the Amanda series. I have bought the second book, Ties that Bind already and I hope to be reading it sometime soon (so many books so little time....)Wild Justice is everything that a thriller reader could ask for, a suspenseful and skillful plot with chilling scenes. This book will leave you wanting more from Margolin. Do not start reading this book at night, you will want to finish it, or keep your lights on for the rest of the night while you try to sleep.Enjoy!!!

This book is about 15 years old and was given to me second hand by a close friend about 12 years ago. It sat on a shelf in my home office all these years being overlooked time and again. While searching through my collection with my daughter about a month ago, I finally discovered it and what a hidden treasure it has turned out to be! This is simply one of the best works of fiction I have ever read and definitely cracks my all time favorite list!To kick things off, a highly illegal, black market organ harvesting schemes goes horribly wrong. But that is quickly put on the back burner as a brutal, multiple murder is discovered at a cabin in the countryside outside of Portland Oregon. A murder scene that would make Hannibal Lecter wince. A wealthy surgeon at a Portland hospital, Vincent Cardoni, is instantly the prime suspect. It doesn't help that he has a cocaine addiction coupled with the fact he is a business associate to a local mob boss. But the surgeon has plenty of enemies who have reason to frame him; most of all his wife. She is also a surgeon, currently suing him for divorce and she has a dark past of her own she has managed to keep secret. There is a cop who is so obsessed with putting Cardoni in jail and the mob boss believes Cardoni has double crossed him. Enter the heroine of the story; Amanda Jaffe. She is a new attorney at her father's law firm and is soon the center of the vortex as this twisted tail of deception, suspicion and brutality beyond imagining unfolds in one plot twist after another. This book is fast paced, well written and captivating from page one. I have always prided myself in being able to figure out the culprit in any "who did it" type of story before I ever reach the halfway point. I was certain I knew who the bad guy was in this story before I was a third of the way into it. By the halfway mark, I was doubting my choice. By two thirds in I was convinced I was wrong. Beyond that I had no clue who it would be as the plot continued to twist and turn in ways I never anticipated. As it turns out, my initial suspicions were correct but not before Phillip Margolin made me doubt my own logic and utterly shattered my powers of reasoning. I highly recommend this book to all readers and lovers of fiction. Once you turn to the first page, strap in and hold on tight; Wild Justice is one wild ride!

What do You think about Wild Justice (2001)?

I LOVED this book. It held my interest from the first few pages, and I was riveted to the end. I identified with all the characters. I rooted for the tender-footed attorney, Amanda, and liked her transition over the years into a strong willed woman and capable attorney. I enjoyed the various other doctors implicated in the brutal crimes (I am not going into detail so I won’t spoil the plot), and each one was a complete character that was well fleshed out. I even liked the various bit players, like Amada’s father, or the policemen investigating the crimes, including Vasquez, because even they were complete characters easily identified and kept distinct from one another.The plot was fantastic, and it kept me guessing until about ¾ way through the book. Everything fit together wonderfully, and the obvious conclusions (given subsequent clues/facts) were spoken of/addressed by the characters, ALL of which were smart. They consequently made smart decisions, and then acted on those decisions, which kept me riveted to this book. There was no spot in the book where I didn’t wholeheartedly agree with something a character did (i.e., no characters went into dark rooms where they heard a noise, no character didn’t see a frame job for what it was, none went to meet suspicious characters unarmed, or without telling someone first, etc).There was nothing I didn’t like. My only irritation was this wasn’t a series, because I wanted MORE as soon as I was done. But I’ll have to settle for the author’s next unrelated work.
—Tara Hall

How can you combine doctors, lawyers, local mafia, serial killers, abusive spouses, and harvested organs on the black market, into a psychological thriller set in the beautiful pacific northwest, and not succeed? I'll tell you how! Read Wild Justice.Phillip Margolin lazily wrote Wild Justice, both in character development and from a plot standpoint. For example, we learn on page 160 that local mafia hitman Ed Gordon is an ex-marine who had been dishonorably discharged for assaulting an officer. An entire page later, in a chase scene in the woods, Margolin writes: "Gordon had hiked and camped in the army..." This sloppiness disproportionately bothered me and I wonder how it gets by both the author and the editor that the marines and the army are not the same. The protagonist is a young hotty who graduated at the top of her law school class, completed a prestigious clerkship, has now gone on to work for Daddy doing criminal defense work in the private sector, and is of course eminently single. Her unbelievable character, who has set her love life aside to succeed as a professional, immediately is smitten with an old friend from childhood who is tall, dark and handsome (and a doctor, God love it!). When the impending relationship is consummated, of course, the protagonist is all a quiver. It is perhaps the worst gratuitous sex scene in fiction, ever.The plot revolves around a serial killer and there are only 3 possible suspects: the coked-out doctor, his ex-wife he abused and who has a trail of dead husbands from whom she has collected life insurance proceeds, and the tall, dark and handsome love interest (did I mention he's a doctor?!). You'll never guess which one it is. Or, more likely, you'll guess who it is within the first hundred pages.Setting aside that we are not concerned with the characters and the psychology is not interesting, the narrative does not have a credible inner logic. In three of the primary professions in this book, law enforcement, law practice, and medicine, we see unethical and unbelievable conduct throughout. I debated giving this book 2 stars because it was interesting. But then I thought that train wrecks are interesting too, but that doesn't make them good.On the plus side, this is a fast read and if you are given the book, like I was, then it is free!
—Robbie

Finally, Margolin is back on his game!I've read Margolin's books since I came across The Burning Man but I've been sorely disappointed by many one of them since because they have never approached the power or the storytelling of that book. While Wild Justice is very much different than The Burning Man, it is a great page turner. I found the story to be inventive, if not twisted. Although, I figured out who the killer was with about 100 pages to go, there were so many plot twists that I doubted my conclusion several times. The ending was tension-filled and full of poetic justice. I'll be reading more.Read all of my Phillip Margolin reviews here: http://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/searc...
—Dale

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