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    Review of HATE CRIME by William Bernhardt (see his website)

    G. P. Putnam's Sons, January 2004

    It is an open and shut case. Two college kids decided that a gay bartender was propositioning them and proceeded to torture him, leaving him dead. The police got confessions. The district attorney intends to win the double-wammy of gaining support from both law-and-order and liberal types, and the college kids are about as unsympathetic as two kids can be. But lawyer Christina McCall knows that every defendant deserves a fair trial and she sees hints of reasonable doubt. If she can only get her partner, Ben Kincaid, to go along. But Ben has issues of his own and wants nothing to do with the young defendant.

    Tulsa cop Mike Morelli has been tortured by the kidnappers who got away with a million dollars in ransom money. But when he's assigned a new case--a murder by electric drill, he grabs on and follows the clues. The clues, however, lead to the same bar where the gay bartender once worked. Could there be a connection? Mike updates his good friend Ben, but the evidence against the college kids seems unshakable. Still, someone is killing and the victims all seem connected to the bar.

    Author William Bernhardt has a truly compelling style. HATE CRIME is one of those books that I picked up and couldn't put down until I had devoured the entire story. The three mysteries (kidnapping, drill murder, and anti-gay murder) are cleverly intertwined, letting Bernhardt spring a new twist at every chapter hook and a couple of romances add human interest to the mix. I did, however, find Bernhardt's reliance on coincidence to be a bit over the top. What are the odds that these crimes are interconnected and that the Oklahoma policeman involved happens to be friends with the lawyer? What are the odds that the young man accused happens to be the step-son of Ben's great love? And what are the odds that two college punks decide to torture a gay man the same evening that someone else intends to murder him?

    Although I found the coincidences offputting, Bernhardt is such a capable story-teller that I still found the story captivating and entertaining.

    Three Stars

    Reviewed 2/14/04

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