Short Straw

Ed Eagle is a sharp criminal lawyer in Santa Fe who ignored his own instincts when he married the alluring Barbara Kennerly. On the morning of his fortieth birthday he wakes up alone. Barbara is gone, his money has been wired to the Cayman Islands, and the wine they shared the night before seems to have been drugged. She appears to have fled to Mexico, out of reach of extradition.

Things get worse when Ed reaches his office. His new client is Joe Big Bear, a part-time mechanic accused of a triple homicide. As Ed digs into the case, he begins to suspect that Joe's trouble is tangled up with his wife's disappearance, and that someone has been playing a much longer game than he realized.

Short Straw is the second Ed Eagle novel from Stuart Woods. It is a fast-moving story of betrayal and shifting loyalties, in which a lawyer who is used to controlling the room has to work out who is deceiving whom.