Bitter Business

Kate Millholland, heroine of two paperback legal thrillers from Hartzmark (Principal Defense; Final Option), makes her hardcover debut in a fast-paced tale that finds the overworked Chicago attorney entrusted with the legal affairs of the wealthy but desperately dysfunctional Cavanaugh family. Bull-headed Jack Cavanaugh, the founder and principal owner of Superior Plating and Specialty Chemicals, runs the lives of his four children with the same obsessive attention he gives his company. He's grooming son Philip to take over the concern, but it's hard-nosed daughter Dagny who has the real head for business and troublesome son Eugene who gets along best with the workers. Then there's daughter Lydia, a spoiled brat who can't stand her father's new wife and who, together with her new husband, is threatening to tear the family and its business apart by selling her shares in the company. Though Dagny's secretary dies of mysterious causes (suicide? murder? an industrial safety violation?), it takes a second death to send narrator Kate searching for a family secret that goes back to the demise of Jimmy Cavanaugh, the golden son who drowned at age 17. Crisp prose, sharply drawn characters and a nicely subordinated subplot--in which Kate is torn between her lover and a private detective--all help keep the reader involved until the climax. The ending disappoints, however, by neither topping nor equaling the sustained and compelling frenzy of Kate's juggling her job, her personal life and a mystery that only she has the desire to solve. (Nov.)