Bestseller Grippando's subpar 17th thriller featuring Florida defense attorney Jack Swyteck (after 2020's The Big Lie) opens with a harrowing scene. Swyteck's daughter, Righley, goes to kindergarten at Riverside Day School, and his FBI agent wife, Andie, is attending a parents' event there when a gunman kills more than a dozen people. Righley and Andie, who rushed to Righley's classroom, are traumatized but uninjured. Andie is later stunned when 18-year-old Xavier Khoury, the son of a close friend, confesses to the shooting. Swyteck reluctantly accepts Xavier as a client, in the hopes of getting him multiple life sentences instead of the death penalty, at the behest of a parent who lost a child but wants to avoid drawn-out court battles. Meanwhile, Andie is put on the hot seat when Riverside seeks to avoid liability for the incident. Despite Xavier's confession, Swyteck pursues the possibility that it was false. The characters are paper-thin, and an over-the-top reveal undermines any suspension of disbelief. Grippando has done better. Agent: Richard Pine, InkWell Management. (Jan.)

A shooting at a Florida school counts 20 wounded or dead. Among the students, but thankfully not among the victims, is Jack Swyteck's daughter. When a fellow student (the son of a Muslim man) confesses to the shootings, Jack, a defense attorney, initially refuses to take his case. But then he's persuaded to change his mind by an unlikely person: the parent of a child who died in the shootings. The Swyteck novels have always incorporated complex, sometimes controversial subjects, and this one tackles a tragically hot topic. School shootings have been in and out of the news for the past few years, and, to his credit, Grippando doesn't sensationalize the issue. He presents an evenhanded, intelligent discussion structured, of course, around a smartly plotted mystery. It should be noted, too, that the novel's characters are fully realized and abundantly human, not the stick figures spouting talking points one finds in much hot-topic fiction. Even with nearly 30 books under his belt, Grippando shows no signs of falling into a rut.

It's tragedy enough that there is another mass school shooting, but events at Riverside Day School in Florida have terrible complications for Miami attorney Jack Swyteck. His daughter attends the school; his wife, FBI agent Andie Henning, is there when the bullets start flying; and, with Al-Qaeda claiming responsibility, Xavier, son of Jack and Andie's friends Amir and Lily Khoury, confesses to the crime. Now Jack is set to defend Xavier. With a 75,000-copy first printing.