A legal thriller that packs a political punch.
“Who throws away their career on an impossible mission to take down a former attorney general and their own firm?” asks Greta Vinet Seville, the heroine of bestselling author Shannon Kirk’s explosive new legal thriller, Tenkill. Greta herself, that’s who.
A successful lawyer, the 37-year-old once craved the high-seven-figure salary and prestige of working for Boston’s “Big Law international powerhouse” Coarse & Cotton. When she took the job, she thought she’d found the Holy Grail — until former U.S. attorney general Raymond Honeywell is brought on as a senior partner, that is.
Honeywell was a driving force behind the controversies of the notorious Davis administration, including its practice of separating asylum-seeking immigrants from their children — even breastfeeding babies — at the Texas border. He’s also the man who once ordered a private militia to tear-gas journalists at a presidential news conference.
Honeywell is pure evil, and Greta refuses to work with him.
While she protests the partnership, an intern discovers documents that implicate Honeywell in an illegal campaign-finance scheme, among other, far more serious crimes. As the firm’s deputy general counsel, Greta quietly opens an in-house investigation and vows to scour Honeywell’s electronic records to prove her case.
But remembering her felonious Aunt Violet’s words — “Never hesitate to escape the very second you think you should” — she decides to disappear for a while, taking the incriminating documents with her. As is quickly becoming clear, she’s no longer just an attorney working to uncover wrongdoing. She’s a woman in grave danger from the powerful people committing it.
As part of her strategy, Greta assembles a clandestine team to navigate millions of electronic files and identify those that prove Honeywell’s guilt, recruiting her close friend and “cosmic sister,” her lover, a tech guru, a quirky hospital-records archivist, a sociopathic summer hire, and her philosophy-professor brother, among others. While she comes close to calling things off because of the risk, by the time a rogue security detail tries to kill her and her team, Greta knows she’s got to finish what she started. The stakes are too high to quit.
Read the rest of my review at Washington Independent Review of Books.
