Reviews of Open Season On Lawyers

"Taut, witty and fast-paced. Cannon is unsparing in her satirical treatment of Los Angeles and has created a perpetrator as resourceful, intelligent and appealing as the cop who pursues him. Open Season marks a career high for a veteran author."
—Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Sharply clever. Readers just might be torn between wanting her to catch him and wanting him to get away."
—Publishers Weekly

"A welcome air of edgy humor sharpens Taffy Cannon's Open Season on Lawyers. You can sense the fun to come from the first sentences: 'Somebody was killing the sleazy lawyers of Los Angeles. In the beginning, hardly anybody even noticed.' The author moves the action from law enforcer to lawbreaker with easy grace."
—Los Angeles Times

"Open Season On Lawyers is Taffy Cannon at her best. The humor is wry and dry and never forced. Cannon has created in Davis a multi-dimensional woman who has done some living, who keeps on keeping on, and who, through it all, still has a rock-and-roll heart. Her plotting is exquisite—as tight and clever as even the most discriminating reader could demand. Open Season on Lawyers is a page-turner with depth and wit."
—BookBrowser

"Taffy Cannon's Open Season on Lawyers hits the bulls-eye with an engaging heroine, a clever plot, and victims you love to hate."
—Anthony Award winner Rochelle Krich

"A brightly malicious tale."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Tight writing, razor edged wit, dead-on L.A. Open Season on Lawyers is a page-turner wrapped in real life. Taffy Cannon has the touch: cops, lawyers, all her characters. Prepare yourself for a deliciously diabolical read."
—Shamus Award winner Richard Barre

"The good guys win, although with some of the victims chosen, it's a bit too easy to think of their killer as doing a service to society."
—Deadly Pleasures

Chapter One of Open Season On Lawyers

Somebody was killing the sleazy lawyers of Los Angeles.

In the beginning, hardly anybody even noticed.

Roger Coskins, who advertised his "Bikes & Boats Legal Services" heavily on local Los Angeles television stations, rode his Harley off a cliff along the Coast Highway north of San Luis Obispo sometime on the night of Thursday, August 29th. He had been returning to L.A. after presenting a continuing legal education seminar at the Rocky Ridge Inn just south of San Simeon.

There were no witnesses to the accident. His body and bike were noticed early the next morning in the pounding surf below the rocky cliff by a retired couple from South Dakota. Police found skid marks from Coskins's Harley-Davidson approaching the two-lane curve the attorney had failed to make. It was a treacherous curve cut into the side of a particularly steep mountain, sheer upright rock on the east, precipitous drop on the west. There was no evidence of impact with any other vehicle.

Obituaries for Coskins all noted the ironic manner of his demise. A few irreverent commentators wondered if anyone would file a lawsuit over the accident, and if so, against whom.

Warren Richardson was found dead in his garage, cherry red, on Wednesday, September 10th. His foot was jammed onto the accelerator of his late-model Lincoln Continental; the ignition was turned on, and the gas tank was empty.

Richardson was a Valencia ambulance chaser who had missed several key filing deadlines in plaintiff's personal injury cases, causing his clients to lose their opportunity for legal redress. He had allowed his legal malpractice insurance to lapse. So when the aggrieved plantiffs filed personally against Richardson, the best they could get was liens on the paltry equity in his practice. He owed more on his house than it was worth.

He left no note, but his death was officially adjudged a suicide after a hasty autopsy that failed to noticed a bump behind the decedent's right ear.

Bill Burke's barely conscious body was found outside his cabin in the foothills of the Sierra mid-morning on Sunday, September 21th. Burke was slumped sideways beside a tree, wearing jeans, an unbuttoned L.L. Bean chamois shirt, and Ugg boots.

His eyes were open. He could move his head and extremities only slightly and with great difficulty. He was unable to speak. He was taken by ambulance into Fresno and placed on a respirator while doctors tried to figure out what in the hell had happened.

The medical personnel had no idea that four days earlier, Burke had won a stunning defense verdict for a San Bernardino restaurateur being sued for an outbreak of food poisoning at a wedding reception. There were two related fatalities.

The jury had come in on Wednesday morning, 10-2 for the defense. On Thursday, two op-ed pieces in the Los Angeles Times used the verdict as a jumping-off point for left- versus right-wing diatribes on the concept of responsibility in the personal injury legal arena. Bill Burke was quoted in both pieces.

By the time doctors at the hospital in Fresno figured out that Bill Burke was suffering from botulism poisoning, it was too late.

Forty-three minutes after the first administration of antitoxin for Clostridium botulinum, Bill Burke was dead.

Three weeks later, on October 12th, civil trial attorney Lawrence Benton was found, parboiled, in the hot tub of his hillside home in Sherman Oaks.
Benton's most notorious recent trial had resulted in a multimillion-dollar award against a fast-food chain that served its coffee hot enough to cause third-degree burns when spilled by a gentleman in the later stages of Parkinson's Disease. The jury had not considered the plaintiff's medical condition contributory negligence.

Benton's trophy wife was out of town when he died, so the personal injury specialist's body was discovered by his live-in housekeeper. Margarita Flores returned from a weekend with relatives in Santa Ana to discover her employer sprawled nude in the spa.

The hot tub had been bubbling so furiously for so long that it was half-empty due to evaporation.

Chapter Two

Detective Joanna Davis was reading the Los Angeles Times and nursing a cup of exceptionally bad coffee in the cafeteria of the Santa Monica Courthouse while she waited to testify in one of her last West L.A. cases, a drive-by shooting.

Tiny, but toned and trim, Joanna was accustomed to asserting authority by sheer force of will. In another month she would turn fifty-two. She had been a detective for ten years, a cop for twenty-one, and a mother for twenty-nine. She instinctively kept her back to the wall and her radar was always on.

So she knew Detective George Watson, a former West L.A. co-worker, was in the room long before he noticed her and strode across to her table.
"Hey, Watson," Joanna said, not looking up from the newspaper's listing of recent restaurant closures by the Department of Health Services. "Says here, they closed your favorite dive last month, Pedro's on Wilshire. Vermin infestation and poor sanitation."

Watson shrugged. "Nothing a little extra hot sauce won't cure. You hear about Benton?"

Joanna looked up now, puzzled. Running the name through her personal data bank and coming up blank. "Who?"

Watson turned a chair and straddled it to sit with his arms resting on the back. "Lawrence Benton. Big-wind lawyer. Bought it out in the Valley."

"Lawrence Benton?" It was Joanna's impression that the Lawrence Bentons of the world died in their sleep as octogenarians, leaving behind vast estates and anxious heirs. His most recent overreaching lawsuit sprang immediately to mind. "What happened? Corporate counsel for Jiffy Burger shoot him at the drive-through window?"

Watson shook his head and grinned. "Better than that. Boiled in his hot tub."

"No!"

"Yes."

Joanna smiled demurely, set the newspaper aside, and folded her hands neatly on the table. "Do tell, Detective Watson."

Watson widened his grin, showing nicotine-yellowed teeth. "Don't know all that much," he admitted. "Just heard about it. Maid found him this morning. Hot tub was boiled almost empty, and old Benton was cooked like a Maine lobster."

Joanna laughed. "Fitting. I think he was from New England. Had one of those irritating accents. 'Ah hahf to pahk the cah.'"

But Watson wasn't listening. "Can somebody actually boil to death in a hot tub?"

Joanna considered. "Probably not. But people pass out and drown pretty regularly. Remember that couple in the motel in Palms?"

"As if I could forget." Watson had worked the case. A motel seeking to upgrade its image had installed hot tubs in all the rooms. Then, shortly after the grand opening, a couple grew woozy from the heat and the wine and died mid-tryst. The bodies were identified by the dead woman's husband, who had not been invited to the party.

"And we know Benton was a boozer," Watson went on. "Beat a couple deuces back when you still could."

Joanna chortled. "I knew the guy who wrote one of those." It seemed a million years ago. The cop who busted Larry Benton blowing a point two-three on the Santa Monica Freeway had been a friend of her first ex-husband. The tall, dour motorcycle cop was probably long retired by now, living in some heavily armed cop enclave in the remote Pacific Northwest.
"Small world," Watson told her, checking his watch. "Gotta go find my D.A. See you, Davis." He rose and swaggered away, while Joanna automatically considered scenarios in which a successful attorney might die in his hot tub.

By late afternoon, when Joanna got back to her office at Robbery-Homicide on the third floor of Parker Center in downtown Los Angeles, word had rippled through the various homicide arms of LAPD that the death of Lawrence Benton was neither natural nor accidental. The Santa Monica Courthouse, where Benton had tried and won the boiling coffee case, had swirled with rumors all day long.

At Robbery-Homicide, Joanna's partner, Al Jacobs, was discussing Benton's death with three other detectives. Joanna had known Jacobs since her second year in uniform, when she was first on the scene of a homicide that Jacobs worked as a detective in North Hollywood. The years had not been entirely kind to him. Much of his hair was gone and he was thirty pounds heavier. It had probably been a decade since he'd last shot a hole in the side of a recalcitrant beer keg to get the brew flowing again. And he seemed perennially weary. But he was still a good heart, with the demeanor of an unmade bed.

"Oh, I don't know," Jacobs was saying when Joanna walked through the door, "I've seen lots of suicides tidy up with one last, incredible burst of energy. No reason Benton couldn't have just fished out that boom box and put it on the counter. Hey, Davis."

She nodded and went to her desk.

"And then he wrapped the cord around the boom box real neat," Mickey Conner added. "Guy was probably a major neatnik." Conner was an old-style copper with a full head of thick white hair, a well-developed gut, and a telltale red road map on his face. His retirement was scheduled for next May, when he had twenty-five years in.

"Helluva suicide statement," Dave Austin added. In this crowd Austin was a mere pup, one of the youngest Robbery-Homicide Division detectives. Austin was a poster boy for the post-Nam era detectives with bachelors' degrees and great computer skills and a penchant for self-improvement. He was almost young enough to be Joanna's son, a circumstance neither of them ever alluded to. He was also a snappy dresser, not in the usual flashy cop fashion, but with a certain muted style. Detective Eddie Bauer.

"What suicide statement?" Joanna asked, sitting down. "And what's all this about a boom box and a cord?"

"Somebody threw a plugged-in boom box into the hot tub and zapped Benton," Austin explained, turning to face her. "Electrocution in the first degree. Actually the hundred and seventeenth degree, according to how hot the hot tub was. But that's not the good part, Davis. The good part is what Counselor Benton was listening to when he began his final plea bargain, trying to talk his sorry ass into heaven."

"'Good-bye, Cruel World'? 'Stairway to Heaven'?" Joanna suggested, riffling through her messages.

"No on both counts," Austin shot back. "Nope, this was a Warren Zevon tune. You know Zevon, Davis?" His tone suggested doubt.

"Of course." Joanna was a Valley Girl, born and bred. Rock and roll had been the soundtrack for her life. "Let me guess. 'Werewolves of London'?" She knew immediately that was the wrong song. As Austin shook his head she held up a hand and offered a beatific smile. "No, of course that isn't it. It's gotta be 'Lawyers, Guns and Money.'"

Austin nodded slowly. "The shit has hit the fan."

The last russet streaks of daylight were fading straight ahead of her when Joanna merged onto the Ventura Freeway heading home just after six. She felt the uneasiness that always overtook her when summer faded into fall and the light faded with it. Next week would end Daylight Savings Time, plunging the world into earlier and deeper darkness.

The romantic in Joanna loved fall, an ephemeral time when smog season segued into Santa-Ana-and-fire season and then into the brief, beautiful days of December and January. But she also knew that autumn delivered days with more darkness than light, brought nights that slithered firmly into position in late afternoon and lingered deep into each following morning. Days when it might rain and rain and rain, cloaking southern California in a wet gray shroud.

But this was supposed to be a dry winter, and so far autumn had been mild and wonderful, with an abundance of mellow, warm winds that swept the smog serenely out to sea. Quietly, too, without the atavistic howling of their more malevolent cousins, those legendary Santa Anas that bred arson and wildfires and psychosis.

Twice in uniform on night watch, Joanna had worked full moons during major Santa Anas. Both nights were wildly unforgettable. On a hot November night when flakes of ash drifted slowly out of a sky glowing crimson above Malibu, she had stood in the doorway of a Studio City bungalow where four people lay butchered, and listened to the inhuman wails of the man who killed them all.

It was fully dark when she finally arrived home, at her isolated rental house in the far western reaches of the San Fernando Valley. As always, she felt revitalized by the simple virtue of arrival at this, her nest. Single for the third time, her children grown and moved on to productive faraway lives, Joanna had created this environment to suit only herself, and she luxuriated in its idiosyncrasy.

She unlocked the cyclone fence gate, then followed the gravel drive around the two enormous California peppertrees that hid the house from the road. Programmed timers kept lights moving on and off around the small stone house while she was gone, and the place stood warmly inviting now, light seeping around the edges of the miniblinds.

She parked under the carport and went in the back door, tossed her bag on the kitchen counter, washed a handful of plump black grapes, and put them in a small glass bowl. Then she kicked off her shoes and sank into the depths of The Chair, a plush royal blue velvet marshmallow she had bought new on an uncharacteristic retail impulse. It was the only place to sit in the room. Privacy, at this stage of her life, ranked far above sociability. Only a handful of relatives and friends had even seen this place. Her sanctuary. Her modest monument to self-determination and a happily-emptied nest and doing whatever she damn well pleased.

She lingered over the grapes, then crossed to the jukebox that stood beside the pinball machine. Her daughter Kirsten—whose own furniture was purchased in groupings featured on the HomeLife show floor—had scornfully described this room as an adult playpen.

Joanna switched on the jukebox and lifted its glass top as the fluorescent light blossomed. The Princess Rockola's visible carousel held fifty 45-rpm records, a woefully inadequate number for Joanna's eclectic music tastes. A small chest of drawers beside the jukebox was filled with six or seven hundred additional 45s, all neatly catalogued.

From the bottom drawer, she now took "Lawyers, Guns and Money," a double-sided Asylum Spun Gold disc backed with "Werewolves of London." She switched the Warren Zevon record with the Janis Joplin currently occupying A-1, one of eight readily accessible slots that she used to rotate temporary songs. She closed the machine, pressed A-1 and listened, then listened again. And a third time.

It didn't really fit, the song. Its lyrics told of jaded youth in heaps of tropical trouble, requested that lawyers, guns, and money be sent. The singer proclaimed himself to be "an innocent bystander." Could that be the message?

She listened to the song a fourth time, certain now that Dave Austin had instinctively picked up the key element here.

The shit had hit the fan.

Tuesday morning, the L.A. Times, short on hard facts about Lawrence Benton's death, ran a piece expanding on the disturbing ironies attendant not only to Benton's demise, but to the recent deaths of two other Southland attorneys, Bill Burke and Roger Coskins.

Later on Tuesday, the actual cause of Benton's death leaked, and the media gleefully reported the name of the song apparently playing at the moment when the boom box and Larry Benton's heart stopped functioning. Warren Zevon's classic Excitable Boy album, from which the tune came, sold out all over southern California by nightfall.

Following Wednesday's SRO Beverly Hills memorial service for Lawrence Benton, the attorney's trophy widow held an "impromptu" press conference that landed her on all the networks. Swathed in black, the stunning young Vicki Benton wiped away a tear and wondered aloud at her husband's death. "There must be some kind of madman out there," she declared breathily. "A terminator. Or maybe, since he's killing attorneys, you'd have to call him an attorminator."

Which moved the story onto another plane altogether. By Thursday morning, TV newscasters and headlines alike had amended the spelling to a slightly more user-friendly Atterminator.

WHO IS THE ATTERMINATOR? wondered the headline in the Los Angeles Daily News. AND WHO'S NEXT?

All content © 2005-11 by Taffy Cannon.