LOVE, BETRAYAL, MURDER

4 stars out of 5

When I got to the end of this engrossing book, lyrics from an old country music hit sung by Patty Loveless (written by Kostas Lazarides and Harlan Howard) started rumbling through my brain: "Blame it on your lying, cheating, cold deadbeating, two-timing, double-dealing, mean mistreating loving heart."

Hmmm - I couldn't have summed up this book any better, I thought.

Sexual harassment and the MeToo movement are timely topics to be sure, and they take center stage with a court battle between attorneys Vanessa Lyons and Matthew Brooks. While working on a joint project at the law firm at which both are rising stars, they start an affair despite the fact that Vanessa is married with a young daughter. Oh, that and the fact that Matthew was named a new partner at the most recent annual partners' meeting, and now he's technically Vanessa's supervisor. She, meanwhile, will be up for a partnership at the next go-'round. Under those circumstances, such a relationship violates the firm's strict policy on hanky panky between supervisors and subordinates. Given their assumption that Vanessa's partnership will come to be - both she and Matt have been told on the QT that she's a shoe-in - they decide to hide their illicit affair until after they're on equal footing once again; at that point, the policy won't matter, and they'll both claim nothing was going on before that.

But as we all know, there's many a slip between the cup and the lip; and as it turns out, Vanessa's shoe-in suddenly gets the boot - effectively ending her ascension to the pinnacle of success she's worked so hard to achieve. Why the about-face? In Vanessa's eyes, the affair did her in. The firm, she claims, knew nothing about the affair; whether they suspected it or not isn't grounds for their denial of her partnership. Besides that, Matt, already a partner, escaped free and clear; no harm, no foul when it came to his employment. Especially amid the Harvey Weinstein brouhaha and #MeToo movement, then, what better time to file a sexual harassment lawsuit against the firm?

Once that's resolved (no, I won't say how), though, that slip between cup and lip becomes more like a chasm given a  jaw-dropping roadblock that puts Matt in a hot seat of a different sort. And his situation becomes the focus for the rest of the book, which ends with another surprise (well, okay, I guessed the possibility early on, actually, but it was nonetheless satisfying to have it confirmed). All in all, it grabbed my attention from the beginning and held on to the end. Thanks to the publisher, via NetGalley, for allowing me to read and review a pre-release copy.  

Love, Betrayal, Murder by Adam Mitzner (Blackstone Publishing, May 2023); 330 pp.