Fatal Cruise - Tapa blanda

Author William Deverell received an intriguing phone call. Would he be interested, he was asked, in defending a 59-year-old homosexual accused of bludgeoning his employer, a wealthy widow, with a liquor bottle while they were cruising in Canadian waters aboard a luxury liner. Deverell took the case – and found himself caught up in a bizarre world of eccentric characters, decadent behaviors, naked greed, and multi-million-dollar wills. To make matters worse, his sweet-tempered client had no memory of committing the murder – yet no means of proving he didn’t.

With penetrating insight, William Deverell probes the mind of the accused and explores the legal system that tried him. Deverell’s superb writing skills combine brilliantly with his insider’s knowledge of the courtroom, and the result is a seamlessly constructed, gripping narrative whose suspense never lets up. Fast-paced and gritty, humane and intelligent, Fatal Cruise is crime journalism at its most provocative and rewarding.

William Deverell’s first novel, Needles, won the $50,000 Seal Award, and, since then, he has published one work of non-fiction, Fatal Cruise, and ten further novels, including Trial of Passion, winner of the Hammett Prize for literary excellence in crime writing and Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel. Deverell created the popular CBC Television series Street Legal and recreated its characters in a novel by that title. He is a founding member and past-president of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, a member of PEN Canada, the Screen Writers Guild, and has twice been chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada. He winters in Costa Rica and spends his summers on Pender Island in B.C.
From the Hardcover edition.