cover image The Advocate’s Daughter: A Thriller

The Advocate’s Daughter: A Thriller

Anthony J. Franze, read by Robert Petkoff. Macmillan Audio, unabridged, 7 CDs, 9 hrs., $34.99 ISBN 978-1-4272-6834-1

This domestic thriller, set in the nation’s capital, follows the travails of D.C. lawyer Sean Serrat, who’s been harboring a dark secret from his youth. Thirty years before, in Japan, he’d stood by while another 14-year-old boy murdered a shopkeeper. With Sean’s name on the president’s shortlist for filling a vacancy in the high court, he faces the possibility of his long-buried secret surfacing. Worse yet, his beloved law student daughter, Abby, is found murdered in the library of the top court. The police arrest her boyfriend, Malik Montgomery, but Sean suspects he’s been framed. Actor Petkoff alters his voice to present a frantic, determined Sean, an excited, indignant Malik, a tough-talking Supreme Court police chief named Martinez, and over a dozen others, including the audibly sneering killer of that shopkeeper from the past, who reemerges with dreams of blackmail. These interpretations add a needed depth to characters who seem to have been written mainly to serve the plot. Petkoff anchors the story by keeping an appropriate pace and underlining the more highly charged sequences with an effectively dramatic tightening of his voice. A Minotaur hardcover. (Mar.)