Noble Chase

Rudolph, a retired Park Avenue attorney and accomplished sailor, makes his fiction debut with this fast-paced, if uneven, legal thriller. After winning a $105 million judgment for a company owned by a Taiwan-based conglomerate, 27-year-old attorney Elisabeth Swahn, an associate at the Manhattan law firm of Wilcox, Swahn and Giles, realizes that her client, Leonard Sloane, has stolen $70 million before apparently dying in a yachting accident near Puerto Rico. When Beth’s stepfather, a retired senior partner at her firm who’s now living on a sailboat in the Caribbean with her mother, uncovers clues that may point to a conspiracy involving Sloane’s death, Beth embarks on a dangerous journey with her parents to track him down and save her career. The dynamic between Beth and her stepfather is an undeniable strength as is the authenticity of the legal and nautical backdrop, but a cardboard villain coupled with an anticlimactic ending will disappoint some readers. [em]Agent: Mel Berger, William Morris Endeavor. (Apr.) [/em]