Brady Coyne is a Boston attorney who focuses on a few private clients and the legal drudgery of their everyday life, which leads to a generally unexciting life. Brady, however, gets a call from an old friend and former neighbor—a man from his past as a happily married man. When Brady was married and living in suburbia, Ken Nichols was his happily married neighbor. Both marriages fell apart years ago and Brady moved to Boston while Ken Nichols moved to Baltimore. Now a decade later and in Boston for a conference, Ken contacts Brady for a get-together and a drink. It’s an uneventful evening but the next day Brady gets a call from Nichols’ ex-wife. She’s standing in her ex’s hotel room, Nichols is lying dead on the floor of his room and she needs Brady’s help. But this savage murder is only the first and Brady is soon trying to find the connection between these long ago friends and the savage murders dogging their family. The late Tapply completed one last Brady Coyne novel before he died in 2009, and it’s a fitting finale to a fine series. As happens regularly, Boston lawyer Coyne is torn away from the comfortable routine of his easygoing practice by a friend in trouble. This time it’s the wife of a former neighbor, who calls Brady from a suburban hotel, where she is standing beside the body of her ex-husband, whom Brady had met the previous night for a drink. The police are interested in the wife, but Brady is convinced the murder has something to do with the couple’s disaffected children. The plot unwinds smoothly, but as always, what holds readers is Brady himself—the quintessential regular guy as sleuth, a man who likes his pleasures (fishing, food, the Red Sox, and the occasional beer) but whose sensitivity to human relationships hovers just below the surface of his amiable exterior. He will be sorely missed by fans of realistic crime fiction. Saying farewell to Brady Coyne is like losing a good friend. --Bill Ott William G. Tapply was a contributing editor to Field & Stream and the author of numerous books on fishing and wildlife, as well as more than twenty books of crime fiction, including Hell Bent . He lived with his wife in Hancock, New Hampshire. One I spotted Ken Nichols about the same time he spotted me. He was sitting at the end of the hotel bar, and when I started toward him, he grinned and raised what looked like a martini glass. I took the stool beside him. He held out his hand, and I shook it. “Glad you could make it, Brady,” Ken said. “Jesus, it’s good to see you. What’s it been?” “Ten years,” I said. “At least.” He was wearing a pearl-colored button-down shirt under a pale blue linen jacket, with faded blue jeans and battered boat shoes. He had a good tan, as if he played golf year-round. His black hair was now speckled with gray and cut shorter than I remembered. Ken had big ears and a meandering nose and a mouth that was a little too wide for his face. He grinned easily, he loved animals, and when he spoke, I could still detect the Blue Ridge Mountains of his childhood in his voice. Ken Nichols was an easy guy to like. He was a veterinarian, and back when we were neighbors in Wellesley, Ken was the one who gave my dogs their rabies and distemper shots, and I was the lawyer who handled the legal work for his business. We used to play in the same foursome on Sunday mornings, and we invited each other’s families over for backyard cookouts on summer weekends. Then Ken got divorced, dissolved his veterinary practice, and moved to Baltimore, and shortly after that, I got divorced, too. We’d been out of touch ever since, but Ken and I used to be pretty good friends, and when he called me earlier in the week, saying he was coming up to Massachusetts to attend this veterinarian convention in the big hotel in Natick and would love to meet me for a drink if I could sneak away, just for old times’ sake, I agreed instantly. Friends, old or new, were always worth sneaking away for. “You’re looking good,” I said to him. “I work out,” he said. “You get to a certain age, you’ve got to take care of the machine, you know what I mean?” “Yeah,” I said. “I do know. Change the oil, replace the filters, rotate the tires. I keep thinking I should do something about my brake pads, but…” He smiled. “Same old Brady.” He showed me his empty martini glass. “So what’ll you have? The usual? Jack, rocks?” I smiled and nodded. “You remembered.” “Some things never change.” The bartender, a Hispanic guy in his twenties with a pencil-thin mustache, must have been listening, because he came over and said, “Gentlemen?” “Another for me,” Ken said, “and a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks for my friend.” After the bartender turned away, Ken said, “So how’s your golf game these days?” “I quit golf a few years ago,” I said. “It came down to golf or fishing, and I picked fishing.” “Tough choice, if you love both.” “I figured out I didn’t love them both the same,” I said, “so it was easy. Quitting golf was a helluva lot easier than