EASY STREET

Six lawyers hide secrets…and so does the industrial building they team up to buy in Impellizzeri’s twisty thriller, one in a series.

The only thing more surprising than hotshot lawyer Archie picking up the check for an exorbitant dinner for six is his invitation to his lover, Felicity, and their four friends and colleagues to take a look at an old industrial building. “I’m about to change all of your lives,” he states. The plan is to purchase the building, which the financially strapped developer wants to sell at a loss and then renovate. “We can do something really creative here,” Archie tells his friends. “We can create something beautiful and special in that space.” For each member of the group, the opportunity seems golden. Ava announces she is taking a sabbatical from their law firm. “I’m going to live,” she says, “so this whole proposal comes at the perfect time.” For Holly, “suddenly a building we were all planning to buy together for barely a million dollars started to look like a nest egg. Our retirement fund.” But personal secrets and the building’s dark past threaten to shake the members of the group to their very foundations. This third installment in Impellizzeri’s Riversedge Law Club series is a standalone narrative that eschews courtroom drama for a compelling story of secrets and lies. (The Riversedge Law Club, an old boy’s network, is more a state of mind here than a driver of the story.) Chapters are told from the perspectives of the individual characters, fleshing out the players while deftly advancing the plot and planting little seeds of foreshadowing. As Holly, one of the six, asks in hindsight, “you might ask—if we had all known about that, would we have bought the damn building anyway?”

Membership in the Law Club should get a boost from this well-told, character-driven story.