Goldman, Joel

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GOLDMAN, Joel

PERSONAL: Married; children: three. Education: Graduated from Kansas University.

ADDRESSES: Home—Montana. Office—Husch & Eppenberger LLC, 1200 Main St., Ste. 1700, Kansas City, MO 64105.

CAREER: Attorney and novelist. Trial lawyer, beginning 1977; Husch & Eppenberger (law firm), Kansas City, MO, attorney.

AWARDS, HONORS: Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination, Mystery Writers of America, 2003, for The Last Witness.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Motion to Kill, Kensington Publishing (New York, NY), 2002.

The Last Witness, Pinnacle Books (New York, NY), 2003.

Cold Truth, Pinnacle Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Deadlocked, Pinnacle Books (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Because Joel Goldman has been a trial lawyer since 1977, he has no need to conduct background research when writing legal thrillers featuring attorney Lou Mason, who works, as the author does, in Kansas City, Missouri. Goldman was inspired to write his first mystery after a conversation with one of his colleagues. As he related on his home page, "I started writing thrillers when one of my law partners complained to me about another partner. I told him we should write a murder mystery, kill the son-of-a-bitch off in the first chapter and spend the rest of the book figuring out who did it." The other lawyer never took Goldman up on the offer, so Goldman proceeded on his own. The result was 2002's Motion to Kill, which has been followed by several more thrillers.

Motion to Kill introduces Mason, an attorney who has just started working for a prestigious firm. While on a company retreat, he considers quitting his job in response to a request by the senior partner to alter important legal documents. The next thing he knows, the partner is found dead, and Mason is one of the main suspects. Cooperating as best he can with investigators, Mason begins his own investigation when he finds himself targeted for murder. As he delves deeper into what appears to be incriminating shenanigans at his firm, he decides to hire private investigator and friend Wilson "Blues" Bluestone to help him before he gets himself killed.

A Publishers Weekly reviewer remarked upon the book's "electrifying denouement," while Harriet Klausner, writing for AllReaders.com, wrote that Motion to Kill "never skips a beat." Klausner predicted that readers will be "surprised that this novel is Joel Goldman's debut" because it is of such high quality.

Suspense and thrills are again on the menu with Goldman's sequels The Last Witness and Cold Truth. In the former, Mason's friend Bluestone finds himself in big trouble after influential political insider Jack Cullan is murdered and Blues becomes the main suspect. Blues hires Mason as his attorney, but Mason soon learns that he cannot win his case because the courtroom has been rigged by politicians to favor the prosecution. He decides that the only way to save Blues is to find the true killer himself. Klausner, writing for AllReaders.com, praised The Last Witness for giving readers an "eye opening look at the American legal system."

Cold Truth involves the murder of a popular television psychologist, who is thrown from an eighth-floor window to her death. When a young woman named Jordan Hackett confesses to the killing, Jordan's parents hire Mason to defend her. Mason suspects Jordan is not telling the truth, and his careful probing leads him to the director of the youth camp where Jordan has been living. AllReaders.com contributor Klausner once again praised Goldman's writing, adding that "Lou is a delightful protagonist."

Mason's next case involves defending the honor of a dead man. In Deadlocked, after Ryan Kowalczyk is put to death by the state for killing two people fifteen years earlier, Ryan's mother and the victims' son both hire Mason to prove that it was really Whitney King, the man who fingered Ryan as the killer, who actually did the deed. "The latest Mason case is a terrific investigative thriller that makes a clear plea on the use of capital punishment; one error is one too many," according to Klausner in a Best Reviews online article.

Goldman told CA: "My work is most influenced by trying to answer the question: What happens when things go wrong? I'm more interested in characters than plot because people are more interesting, especially when they find themselves in impossible and unexpected circumstances. That's also why I enjoy writing a series; it allows me to see how the core characters evolve over time and respond to things that happen to them."

"Deadlocked is my favorite because it brings together many of these elements of character development and because the story raises important issues about justice and reconciliation. I also think it's the most well written of my novels and reflects my development as a writer."