Kill the Messenger

Jace Damon is a Los Angeles bike messenger who grew up on the city's rough streets, and he has one last delivery before he can call it a day. The package is bound for Lenny Lowell, one of the least respectable defense attorneys in town. Before he gets there, a car nearly runs him down, he is pursued through back alleys, and someone opens fire on him. The street smarts he learned as a kid are all that get him out alive, and he escapes with the envelope that somebody is willing to kill for.

When Jace goes back to Lowell's office, the police are already there, the lawyer has been brutally murdered, and Jace is the main suspect. Now he is running from the cops and from a killer at once. He has a ten-year-old brother depending on him, and the only thing that might save them both is the envelope, which holds the one thing nobody wants delivered: the truth.

The case would normally go unnoticed in a city that runs on money, celebrity and spectacle, since nobody makes headlines over the death of a small-time lawyer. That is why homicide detective Kev Parker is puzzled when investigators from the LAPD's elite robbery/homicide unit take an interest. Parker's career is in decline, and he would rather forget the days when he worked the high-profile cases that turned everyone involved into a star. One of those was the prosecution of fading leading man Rob Cole, accused of murdering his wife, Tricia Crowne-Cole, the daughter of one of the city's most powerful men, in what the press called L.A.'s crime of the century.

Parker suspects Lowell was tied to something big enough to get him killed, and his hunt for answers could lead him to the murderer or to the end of his career. Moving from gritty streets to enclaves of wealth and power to the hard glamour of Hollywood, Tami Hoag's thriller shows how dangerous it is to tell the truth in a town built on fantasy and fame.