Randall Hicks - Baby Crimes (2007)
Reviewed by Yvette Banek
California: land of ripe avocados and overripe passions. Into the fray, suntanned and swinging a mean tennis racket, comes Randall Hick’s likeable hero, ready and eager to right the wrongs of the rich.
Baby Crimes is the very natural and sympathetic sequel to The Baby Game, Hick’s award winning debut featuring adoption lawyer/tennis pro, Toby Dillon. Now this might seem an odd combination of professions but fear not, it is all perfectly natural. At least in the way that Toby explains it.
I wear two hats. By day I’m an attorney, specializing in adoptions, at least as much as one can specialize when you’ve been an attorney for all of eighteen months. By, well, the rest of the day, I’m a tennis pro. Assistant tennis pro, actually.
…While most people paid big bucks for country club living, I got to stay at Coral Canyon twenty four hours a day, gratis. When I’d got back from a three year Peace Corps stint in Nepal, I had no money, no job…I’d been a court rat throughout high school and college, and helped the club pro, Lars, with his clinics from time to time. So he created a part time job for me: Assistant Tennis Pro. That was seven years ago. There was no salary, but in exchange I got a small apartment right next to the courts…When I passed the bar exam last year, Lars feared I’d turn the grunt work back over to him and trade my racquet for a tie, so he convinced the Pro Shop to give up their storage room to keep me on the premises. My potential clients had to wend their way past a cardboard cutout of Tiger Woods, and displays of overpriced putters, but this seemed a small price to pay.
Some lawyers may have looked at wiping pigeon poop off the tennis courts as beneath them, but I considered myself the lucky one in the deal.
Told you it would seem natural. I mean, what else is an aspiring lawyer to do when faced with country club temptation? Not that Toby is your typical country club type. Not at all. He’s just a nice guy who’s no fool and isn’t one to waste an opportunity. Plus he loves to play tennis and golf.
Anyway, Toby is the inspired creation of Randall Hicks, an awfully nice guy himself as well as a California based, real-life adoption attorney/avocado farmer/sheep rancher and published mystery author. Obviously no slouch in the odd combo category himself.
In Baby Crimes, Toby’s heretofore nonexistent love-life is definitely improving – down-to-earth movie star Rita MacGilroy is back - and he’s got a couple of adoption puzzles that need his unique brand of lawyering smarts.
This time around his clients are wealthy, supercilious couple Nevin and Catherine Handley who want Toby to straighten out a messy adoption problem from the past. Bad publicity is to be avoided at all costs and besides, their sixteen year old daughter Lynn (coincidentally, Toby’s favorite tennis pupil), would be the one hurt most if the awkward truth were revealed.
If not for the fact that Toby admires Lynn for the feisty, good-hearted teenager she is, he wouldn’t touch this case with a ten foot pole. In actuality, the self-important Handleys appear more concerned about negative publicity than their daughter. It seems the couple is being blackmailed when they can least afford the notoriety: Nevin Handley has just been elected County Supervisor. Enough said.
Toby’s other case is that of Amanda, a young woman who is giving up her baby for adoption. It is his job to facilitate the transaction, a sensitive situation which calls for all of Toby’s skill and judgment.
…..when a birth mother comes to see me, I explain how adoption works, then show her couples I’m working with who are hoping to adopt…..Amanda had chosen Aaron and Charlotte Colburn. They owned my favorite restaurant, a little Italian mom and pop place in town called Costa Brava….After just one meeting with Aaron and Charlotte, Amanda was sure they were the perfect parents for her baby. It was a good match…. Everything was looking good in the adoption until I’d hit a snag with the birth father…
When one of his clients is murdered, it is up to Toby to find not only the blackmailer, but a murderer as well. In the grim course of events, the truth becomes expendable as Toby comes up against an odious crime kingpin and faces down (more or less), some very dangerous street gang members with their own unique code of ethics.
None of this is easy when you’re the on-call tennis assistant pro and dead bodies keep turning up while you’re trying to prove to the woman of your dreams that your life is not as turbulent as it appears. In Baby Crimes, Toby will learn once again that secrets, besides being deadly, are often “closer than they appear in the mirror.”
Filled with the author’s wry sense of humor and the rather old fashioned notion that character counts more than money, Baby Crimes is sure to intrigue the most jaded mystery lover looking for something a little bit different.
A surprising triple twist ending that will definitely catch you off-guard is included at no extra charge as Randall Hicks delivers the goods in his terrific second book. This is a sparkling new series written by a very witty guy who really knows what he’s talking about and doesn’t mind sharing a laugh or two while he’s about it.
Posted by Yvette Banek in Book Reviews | Permalink
