A Killing on the Hill

Dugoni (One Last Kill, Her Deadly Game) takes a detour into Seattle’s past in his latest legal thriller. In 1933, in a world worried about the rise of a German Chancellor named Adolf Hitler and the United States feeling the crunch of the Great Depression, a young man named William “Shoe” Shumacher leaves home to take a position at one of Seattle’s newspapers. Shoe receives assistance from a homicide detective and is given special access to a murder at a social club. A former boxer named Frankie Ray is killed by the club owner, George Miller, who claims self-defense. Shoe begins to suspect there is more to the story as he writes his daily updates for the Seattle Daily Star. Dugoni juggles a compelling crime story with a sweet romantic tale as Shoe falls for a young woman who works at a bakery, and they begin to fall in love, even as he spends every day in the courtroom watching the case unfold. The case is compelling, the characters are stellar, and the prose takes the reader back to a time when DNA and technology were not available to make a slam-dunk prosecution. Is it too early to say that this will be remembered as the best legal thriller of the year?