Breach of Trust by David Ellis

Jason Kolarich was once an up-and-coming young defense attorney at one of Chicago’s highest profile private law firms. Following a case in which his strategy was the key in securing the acquittal of a State Senator from federal murder charges it seemed as if the sky was the limit for his future. Except something went terribly wrong at the end of the trial.

While he was in his office late one winter night waiting for a phone call from an informant, Jason’s wife, tired of waiting for him to come home as promised, packed their infant daughter in the car and headed out for a planned visit to her parents. They never made it. Their car skidded off the icy road along the way, killing both.

Not able to shake the loss – and the thought they’d still be alive if he had been driving – Jason has hit a place in his life where he simply doesn’t care anymore. Not about himself, his business; only his grief matters. He hadn’t taken care of his own and they were dead because of it.

But when he learns that the informant whose call he had been waiting on the night of his family’s deaths was himself killed the same night, Jason is jolted back to life and into action. Believing there’s no way the timing was a coincidence, Jason sets out to learn the true circumstances behind the informant’s death.

Before he knows it Jason finds himself in an ever deepening web of bribery, extortion, and kickbacks, one that appears to run all the way up to the Governor’s office. Caught between crooked politicians and their shady advisers and the federal government investigating the corruption, Jason has to find a way to get to the truth he so desperately needs to move on with his life, while doing whatever necessary to make sure he doesn’t end up in jail…or the ground.

Author David Ellis isn’t just any attorney turned novelist. Having served as the House Prosecutor in the Impeachment trial of Governor Rod Blagojevich before the Illinois State Senate, Ellis has had a unique peek behind the curtain at exactly how dirty politics can get and what is needed to take down corrupt government officials. That, combined with his finely tuned feel for dialogue and the sympathetic, well developed character of Jason Kolarich, makes Breach of Trust the most absorbing political thriller I’ve read in quite some time.

Breach of Trust is available from Putnam (ISBN: 978-0399157103).