Enemy Combatant »

Ed Gaffney took ten years of work as a criminal lawyer, added an overactive imagination, and came up with a new career as a novelist. This has led to an unexpected number of requests from his softball teammates to appear with Terry and Zack in future books. Ed lives west of Boston with his wife, New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Brockmann, their two children, and their anxious, but ever-loyal dogs, Sugar and Spice. He is the author of Premeditated Murder and Suffering Fools, both featuring Zack Walker and Terry Tallach, and is currently at work on his next legal thriller.

A man charged with the brutal act of terrorism...

A lawyer sworn to defend him...

A courtroom spinning wildly out of control...

In the trial of the decade, attorney Tom Carpenter was just a spectator. Until, to his own astonishment, Tom finds himself thrust into a case primed to explode…

The whole world thinks Tom’s new client is guilty of the worst act of terrorism since 9/11—except for one shadowy figure, who feeds Tom astounding inside information. But just as the trial is about to break wide open, Tom receives a chilling threat. Suddenly Tom cannot trust anyone, and his family must run for their lives. The only way to survive—and the only hope for justice—is for Tom to crack a terrifying conspiracy so vast and so powerful that anyone who believes it has already been marked to die….

Publishers Weekly

Gaffney's latest gut-grabbing legal thriller turns up the heat on attorney Tom Carpenter by stacking the deck against him and his new client, Hispanic Muslim Juan Gomez, who is accused of being a mass-murdering terrorist. In a nice opening gambit from Gaffney (Diary of a Serial Killer), Carpenter gets the case thrust upon him when Gomez's appointed public defender fails very publicly to defend Gomez during jury selection, and Carpenter becomes a very vocal witness in the gallery. It's not far into the trial before Carpenter is threatened in the men's room of the Phoenix, Ariz., courthouse by a hooded assailant, who claims to want to warn Carpenter of a conspiracy to target him and his family-while holding a gun to his head. When the masked stranger appears to play a role in bolstering the prosecution, Carpenter knows he must find out who he is, what he knows and who, if anyone, is behind his actions. The secondaries are stick figures at best, but Carpenter's first-person narration carries the story, with plenty of thrills and chuckles along the way. (Feb.)