The Last Best Hope (Thorndike Press Large Print Basic Series) - Hardcover

Divorced from his wife, recovering from a coma and tired of living in Calusa, Florida, Matthew Hope has reached the end of his spiritual tether. When Jill Lawton hires him to find her husband, who's been seen "up north" with another woman, Hope thinks it's just another failed marriage ... until a body washes up on the beach with no face and Jack Lawton's driver's licence in his pocket.

Hope enlists the help of Steve Carella, from the 87th precinct, and together they find that the Lawtons weren't the ordinary, wholesome, tennis club members that they appeared to be. Jack Lawton is planning to steal a prized Greek artefact from the Calusa museum. Jill has a plan of her own, and both of them are sleeping with Melanie Schwartz, who is also sleeping with Peter Donofrio and Ernest Corrington-- both ex-cons.

The Last Best Hope is a wild ride. It starts out as a sleepy, love-gone-bad story and twists itself into a tightly wound tale of murder, deception and kinky sex. Almost every character is unpredictable and almost every character is a suspect. Ed McBain's two series characters--Hope and Carella--make a powerful team and the friendship that develops through the book lends the story an important sympathetic element. -- Mara Friedman

Jill Lawton wants Matthew Hope to find her husband, Jack. Her tale is commonplace: a middle-aged husband goes north to look for work, finds another woman, doesn't come back. The embittered wife wants out - with alimony. It's the kind of manhunt Hope's associates Chambers, Kiley, & Lamb can normally handle with their private eyes closed. But that is before a corpse turns up on a Calusa beach with Jack Lawton's ID in his pocket. Hope should have remembered the first axiom of being a criminal lawyer: the client always hides something...such as the kinky, sizzling sex life this Jack and Jill preferred. Instead Hope asks for help from cops up north where Jack Lawton was last seen, and starts snooping around the Sunshine State himself. Here some slimy critters hide in the deep eddies and local watering holes. And here Hope, shaky from the gunshot wounds he barely survived, suddenly has second thoughts about tangling with them.