Kindle Edition Download to your Nook (eBook) Amazon Debrah Martin - Author Amazon Category:  Mystery/Suspense Publisher: I. M. Books Type: Fiction Pages: 259 Copyright: 30th September 2014 ISBN-13: 9780992996161 Price: $2.99 (eBook) No-one is what they appear to be, especially not Lawrence Juste QC. And no sooner does he patch one hole in his fraying life than another appears – unless his dead wife can help...  Lawrence Juste is the perfect QC - with the not so perfect past. But with his meddling wife about to be laid to rest and his long term enemy silenced by the threat of exposure as her killer, the judge's mantle is almost round his shoulders. What could possibly go wrong for the brightest star of the courts? Plenty. A series of blackmail notes implicating him in murder – together with the ever-present threat of joining the murder victim if he doesn't pacify his blackmailer – keep Juste in suspense to the brink of desperation. No-one is what they appear to be, especially not him. And no sooner does he patch one hole in his fraying life than another appears. It seems it can only end one way; disaster – unless his dead wife can help...   Patchwork People is the 2nd book in the compelling Patchwork People trilogy series of murder, mystery and lethal relationships which opened with Patchwork Man. The final book in the series, Patchwork Pieces, will be released in 2015.        Excerpt Prologue: ‘Just(ic)e served at last – but not the final verdict.’ ‘Crap!’ I said aloud after I read it. Luckily no-one could hear me, unless there was already a lurking reporter vying with Ella, my interfering junior, to keep tabs on me. The original cheesy article about my historic revelations in court had sung my praises for the courage to admit to a less than praiseworthy past. Temporarily I was the darling of the courts, but this editorial was bad news. Didactic diarrhoea – but also catapulting me into the spotlight for the caustically curious and enthusiastic mud-flingers amongst the public at large. ‘Who would have thought it? The white knight of the courts, Lawrence Juste, has a murky past! A family from hell, including an ex-con; a childhood in care and an unusually lucky find in the man originally prepared to fund his studies to get him on to the legal ladder. Lord Justice Wemmick was no doubt an altruist of the first order to bankroll not only Juste’s studies, but the charity Finding Futures for Families (FFF) which later came to the rescue of the young client Juste has recently and miraculously cleared of a charge of manslaughter. The boy has haemophilia and so, of course, couldn’t possibly have done it – according to Juste. Ironically, we now find that Danny Hewson is also a relative; one of the Juste clan that he’s so studiously concealed until now … One has to wonder why Juste was originally chosen as the beneficiary of such generosity from Wemmick. So much goodwill flying about – one would think it was Christmas! Will Juste be revealing all about that too? Perhaps not. But however that came about all those years ago, sources claim that it was Juste’s deceased wife, Margaret, who put him and the boy together. Sadly she’s not here to see the happy result after her tragic death in a hit and run accident only weeks ago, but in the meantime we watch with interest the man most tipped for the top to make High Court Judge this year and his erstwhile family, complete with its very own Blackbeard in his brother Winston – amusingly named after one of our greatest leaders, apparently. What will the future now hold for our embarrassingly honest or profligately careless Lord-Justice-Juste in-waiting? Publically acclaimed as potentially one of the most ‘squeakily-clean’ lawmen of the current legal world, will he become a fighter for the underdogs that he – by his own admission – is one of? Or will he return to his lofty eyrie to continue fighting expensive battles on behalf of the rich and privileged until he swaps his black silk for the scarlet? As my learned colleague so rightly said, the jury’s still out on that!’ Wild was probably behind it – pissed that I’d made a fool of him in court with Danny’s dismissal. I flung it down with disgust next to the black-edged funeral card that had been anonymously delivered an hour ago with its own ominous little message. Between them they covered up Danny’s case papers, but the problem of Danny was never far from my mind, whether obvious or not. The message on the card taunted me. ‘The rat has had its day in court, but now the piper wants to be paid – like with all good business transactions. Honour amongst thieves, Lawrence. I’ll be in touch soon. J’ Jaggers. ‘J’ had to be Jaggers; John Arthur Wemmick – rival, enemy, abuser from my days in the children’s home, extortionist, and now about to be my nemesis, it seemed. Joining the sarcastic editor in nipping at my heels but in a more sinister way. To everyone else getting my ‘nephew’ Danny off a manslaughter charge might have seemed like another masterly performance by Lawrence Juste QC, but for Jaggers it was merely the prequel to nuclear war, and only he had the atomic weapons. The newspaper had nudged the card up against the portrait shot of Margaret that still adorned my desk for appearances’ sake. The card was identical in design to the ones I’d had sent out as invitations to her funeral tomorrow. She smiled ingenuously back at me. RIP – gone but hardly forgotten – the tricky little bitch. I knew what Jaggers wanted from me, but Margaret? She’d had a completely different agenda which I had yet to fully ascertain. Ridiculously I suddenly felt like laughing, even though none of it was funny. Who would have believed someone so decorous could be so devious too? My charming spouse; but also my enemy’s equally captivating sister, conning me into a trap and still beaming at me as I faced ruin. If she’d been alive and in front of me right now I’d have cheerfully compounded all my other crimes by strangling her. And so much for my attempt to call Jaggers’ bluff with the evidence supposedly showing he’d driven the car that had mown Margaret down. Dirty money was still dirty money when all was said and done – and he wanted what I’d ‘persuaded’ good old Judge Wemmick (deceased) to part with back at all costs. Perhaps this had all started with defending Danny and unexpectedly running up against my long-lost family, but how this ended was likely to be much nastier. Danny: just over ten years old like the murder case I’d been fixed to prosecute, and won on the same basis. Me: just short of ten years old when I’d been taken into the children’s home where I’d met Jaggers and my feet were first set on this path of secrecy and denial. Margaret: first landing up in my office ten years ago to encourage me on this merry dance. There was a lot of coincidence in ten, and what seemed to be as much at the heart of the mess I was now in as Jaggers’ demands for Judge Wemmick’s money to be returned. And the nasty question of my part in Danny’s parentage? That was the icing on the cake. Murder, blackmail and incest – what better way for a middle-aged barrister to start the day? Tipped for the top, but anticipating the fall.   Chapter 1: Little Pieces In life there are days when ebullient optimism makes you hopeful things can still improve, even though you don’t know how. Equally there are others when you know it can only get dramatically worse. I was contemplating Margaret and her trickiness, the little black-edged card, the editorial and how things couldn’t get much worse when they did just that. My Chambers partner, Heather Trinder, draped herself against my office door dangerously reminiscent of all the mythological harpies she’d ever spouted about when reminding us plebs of her classical background. Her arrival definitely precluded improvement. ‘Ah, so you’ve read it too.’ She gestured to the editorial as I whisked the card into my top drawer. ‘When I showed you that press release I’d organised earlier, I had no idea exactly how much shit had already hit the fan. Now I have. So, what are you playing at? You should have run everything past us before you spilled anything in court. Good job Ella has filled me in now. Have you no consideration for what it could do to me, Francis and Jeremy?’ Ella. I should have known she’d drop me in it. When, at the eleventh hour of Danny’s case coming to trial, Heather had lumbered me with her as my junior I guessed there was an ulterior motive. She was the spy in the fold. The confession in court had been in order to get Danny off and try to keep Jaggers at bay, not for amusement’s sake – but there was no point saying that to Heather. She would simply treat me to a rant about being facetious. The only way was down, but I was determined to make a fist of defending myself. Die trying – better than running away but still dying. ‘Heather, I’m the one under siege here, not you.’ ‘Maybe; but what you do reflects on us too. And I know I might have appeared to have given you carte blanche to sleep with the little social worker to take the edge off things, but I didn’t give you leave to confess to the world that you have links to the criminal fraternity via a family that you’ve kept a guilty secret until now. My God, the press are going to have a field day with you now if you’re not careful – and us.’ ‘But it looks like it could also be a converting zeal field day, don’t you think?’ I waved the newspaper article she’d originally been so smug about at her. ‘I quote, “certainly, Lawrence Juste can no longer be said to be squeaky-clean, but will he prove to be the most squeakily honest lawman we’ve come across in a long time?”’ I grinned, hoping it was charmingly. It obviously wasn’t. ‘And I quote, “the jury’s still out on that.” You,’ she thrust a dagger-like claw at me, ‘are going to have to actually be squeaky-clean now, and squeaky-honest. Make sure publicly you are, whatever you do in private. If I catch even one whiff of anything dodgy finding its way into the open, I’ll macerate you. I had to promise all kinds of nasty little favours to make sure that newspaper report was favourable, and now that’s all down the pan. Starting with tomorrow, what are your plans minute by minute – and don’t even think about trying to give Ella the slip again.’ ‘Ah,’ so my paranoia hadn’t been wrong. Ella, the unamiable, was also my minder. ‘Is she my little helper from now on then?’ ‘You’d better believe it, at least until you’re out of the shit.’ I considered what being out of the shit would require. It was almost too exhausting to think about but I was going to have to address it sometime soon with Heather breathing down my neck and Ella converting it to steam. I inventoried it in my head as Heather tapped her talons impatiently on my long-suffering desk. It was a salutary reminder that one win in court didn’t mean victory.

Amazing follow-up in suspense trilogy
The second novel in Martin's Trilogy got even more exciting...and twisted! This family drama makes one of the best psychological suspense books I've read...Do read my review of the first book if you haven't already, but Martin spends a few chapters in the second book to also help bring readers up to date. But honestly, reading the first book makes a better introduction about the mire into which readers will be taken in Patchwork People. If you love this genre as much as I do, then consider this a must-read...

I found I had great sympathy and empathy for the main character Lawrence Juste. He's a Queen Counsel of the Bar of England and has, or had, aspirations for a promotion. But that was before... Before his wife was killed in an accident. Before he was on a case for a young boy. Before he was attracted to the boy's social worker and succumbed to his desires. Before his family from whom he'd been estranged came out of the woodwork...

And then there was the fact that his legal firm was failing and he was accused of emptying the main account! By using his wife's card... Heather, one of his partners was quick to step in and call him on it, but after they had talked and he explained what was happening, she agreed to help, but not without making sure she knew exactly what was happening at all times, even trying to use her niece as one of his guards...LOL...

It was Danny who was the only one who seemed "regular" people. You know what I mean... he said what he wanted to say and didn't hold back, unless he was afraid... He had, strangely, wound up in Lawrence's heart and Danny was soon the primary issue as he was trying to wade through all that was happening...

Especially, when Danny's mother was murdered. in Lawrence's house! Danny's mother? Lawrence's sister! The one he hated.
Because she had been picked to stay with the family, while Lawrence went into a home where everything terrible that could happen...did...

To make things even worse, he was now routinely receiving incriminating notes, warning him that it was coming soon...A spooky thing about these notes were that they were written on the funeral cards that he'd used for his wife's funeral notification! Immediately he decided that J was for his long-term enemy from school years who, wanted the money back that his father had once given to Lawrence...

But before long, there was a fire in his home, arson, and Lawrence was confused since he now had no way to even consider giving any portion of that money back. Still somebody was blackmailing him and there were certainly a few things in his past that, if they came out, could ruin his future...

And then there is Win, his oldest brother, who had been one of the boys who had started everything when he was young, had a working connection with Jiggers but who also seemed to be trying to bring the family back together, even though Lawrence couldn't really trust him.

Lawrence Juste, a man who changed his name to rid himself of any connection to his former family and his tormented past, is now being forced to not only face his past but see's his present life unfolding patch by patch as pieces are torn a piece at a time from his mind. Will he be able to become the professional he has been trained to be, exclude his emotional upheavals that are hitting one right after the other, to save himself, his firm, his career--and maybe heal some of the wounds with the family members who seem to be willing to accept him back into their lives? What I can tell you is that it can only get worse before it gets better--if it does, that is...

Kat has now proven to be patched in to the police, having turned over evidence she had promised him to keep... His older sister has died and it was only by accident that he chose to visit her that day...and received the box she had left for him, only to have it burned in his house fire...

Deeper and Deeper and Deeper. The whole book is a tantalizing tease for readers to pick apart, one patch, one color at a time. Will anybody remain once too many patches have been removed. Let me put this way...Here's one reader who can't wait to see how this Trilogy finishes! Brilliant illustration of the psychology of people and how our minds can both conceal, reveal...and hide, even from ourselves... Amazing Novel!

GABixlerReviews
Paperback provided for Review

Ended too soon ...
Mystery Novels are one of my favorite genres. There have been some I dnf, they were boring. I didn't find this one boring at all. Patchwork People is among the best mystery novels I've read in a while. This is Book Two of the series but it is a stand alone, so don't worry if you haven't read Book One.

The character, Lawrence Juste, I find very enjoyable. He jumped the gun when he thought all was well because it ended up it wasn't. Blackmail letters start arriving.
early on in the book. Once that started, I knew I was in for a real ride with this one. This was a mystery that I got so attached to, that I couldn't put it down. I couldn't turn the pages fast enough. I was trying to come to a conclusion of what was going on. My only problem with this book was it finished too soon. That to me is a sign of a good book. You want more and this is how the book ended. The reader wanting a third book. It can't come soon enough.


Couldn't put it down
I have been into mystery novels lately, but have been disappointed by quite a few of them. Patchwork People is different, and probably the best I've read thus far. It is Book 2 in the series, but if you haven't read book 1 it doesn't really matter because this is a story of It's own.

Lawrence Juste is an enjoyable character all on his own. He finally thinks that he's off the hook with nothing to fear. However, he will soon discover how wrong that thought is. The blackmail notes start to come in, very early on in the book. Once that started, I knew I was in for a real ride with this one.

From beginning to end, I couldn't seem to put this down. It kept me on the edge of my seat, and also made my mind rattle trying to figure out what was about to happen next.

This was a great read, and I can't wait for the third to come out!