Manning Wolfe, a Texas lawyer, has created a fascinating character who is also a Texas lawyer named Quentin Bell (or is it?). Quentin is leading a double life (not a spoiler), or rather living one life in an identity not his own. This is the primary suspense and peril in Hunted by Proxy, as Quentin juggles his attempt to open a law office, handle his cases – and one big case in particular – while avoiding those who hold grudges against him and would reveal his hidden secrets. The character works and Ms. Wolfe successfully made me care about Quentin and frantically turn pages to see what would happen in this fast-paced story.

The book focuses mostly on the plotline of Quentin being followed by a man working for “the boss,” who has sent Quentin a letter claiming to know his secrets. Hence, Quentin is being hunted by proxy. How this negatively affects his life and how he handles the personal crisis is the best part of the story. There is also a case (the book is about a lawyer, after all), involving a major traffic accident involving a semi-trailer that killed 8 people. Quentin is appointed by a local judge to represent a 7-year-old girl whose mother was killed in the crash and who lost a leg. The orphaned girl also has a court-appointed guardian – a lovely psychologist named Channing who becomes Quentin’s love interest as they jointly try to protect the interests of the shattered girl. The civil litigation involves some standard tropes – a shady plaintiff’s lawyer who advertises on TV and employs an unethical investigator, a potentially corrupt judge, a high-powered defense lawyer who will do anything to win, and a recovering alcoholic truck driver. The civil case blows through the Texas court in record time, culminating in the obligatory trial sequence near the exciting conclusion. The trial scenes are not the best in the book, but the conclusion is intricate and both ties up loose ends and creates new ones for the next installment in the series.

There is a lot of good here, including some excellent prose, pithy descriptions, and enough intrigue and excitement to keep you reading. It’s a good story. There are, however, some problems that I expect Ms. Wolfe will be able to fix in future books. The biggest flaws are the incorrect depictions of the legal process, which are numerous. I understand that civil litigation in real life is boring and takes a very long time. In order to fit a whole case into one book, an author has to compress the timeline and gloss over things that would really happen. In this book, however, Ms. Wolfe describes many things that would never happen and many things that could happen, but only very differently. I’m a lawyer myself and I was constantly annoyed by the depiction of events that were not just implausible, but impossible. If you don’t care about realism, or don’t know how things really work, you might not notice at all and blow through the story fully satisfied with the exciting and intriguing events. That’s fine, but for me, it’s a problem when an expert accident reconstruction witness does not testify until rebuttal and then manufactures a new animated model of the events based on new evidence never before disclosed to the opposing counsel (as an example). It doesn’t happen that way in real life.

Also troublesome is the complete absence of temporal consistency or even temporal markers to let the reader know how much time has passed between events. The reader might think the entire chain of events happened in a month, or they could have taken more than a year. The author doesn’t tell us. There are other inconsistencies in the internal reality of the fictional story and far too many typos and copy editing errors (which I hope are fixed by the time future readers see the text.)

Also, particularly problematic for me, is that Ms. Wolfe made Quentin a poker player. That’s great (I’m an avid player), except that when making that a major character trait, the author needs to get the poker scenes right. Sadly, the scenes here are mostly wrong, including a major moment when Quentin “wins” a huge hand where the description of the poker play is not only wrong in most details, but the cards as described result in Quentin actually losing the hand – but then raking in all the chips. Very sloppy.

Despite these blemishes, and others, I found myself still caring about the characters and wanting to get to the end to see what happened. That’s a good thing. I expect that Ms. Wolfe will be able to improve the writing, clean up the issues listed above, and make the next book much better. I will be looking forward to reading it to find out.