This book continued to pull me in right up to the very last sentence, and now I need to read the next book in this series.
Yes a little bit of everything here for you, with blackmail, murder, romance, relationships, and when you wonder what one part of the book has to do with the other, they meld.
The author has us walking in the shoes of a young woman who has literally pulled herself up by the bootstraps, and yet whenever she falls down, she gets up and brushes herself off and continues.
From her rocky relationship with her family, to the love of her life, to her job as a lawyer, we continue on with her, she is one remarkable person. A murder mystery that is really going to make you think and boy was I surprised at the ending.
I received this book through Great Escapes Book Tours, and was not required to give a positive review. ( )

Hollis Morgan has several important things going on in her life. As a probate attorney, she is settling the last wishes and instructions of a client Matthias Bell. A one-time convict but now pardoned and an attorney, she is working to accept the fact that her estranged mother (estranged because of her prison past) needs one of her kidneys to replace the one she is losing due to infection. She also misses and worries about her current squeeze/significant other, who is away on an undercover mission. All this comes to a head when police, alerted by his relatives, conclude that someone murdered Matthias Bell. Of course, Bell was not exactly a nice guy, but had been blackmailing several people for several years. In his papers, Bell has directed Hollis to deliver envelopes, with whatever damaging evidence he had on the people being blackmailed, to each person he had been blackmailing. Thus, Hollis sets out on a mission to take care of Bell’s wishes while, at the same time, defend Bell’s secretary who has been wrongly accused of killing him, and to figure out who actually murdered Bell.

This is a great story. It pulled me in from the very beginning and kept my attention throughout. Hollis Morgan is a wonderful character, not the usual one we find in so many similar books, but comes across as a very real person, who makes good decisions and has a good head on her shoulders. I definitely would like her taking care of my business. The one thing I did not like was the very ending of the book, which unfortunately led me to downgrade the story rating by one star (I always do this when a story ends like this one did). Still, the story line was interesting and presented in a well-thought-out, well-planned manner. I enjoyed watching Hollis interact with her fellow workers in the firm as well as with her estranged family. Though not really germane to the story, the events with her family played well into it, helping to explain why Hollis was who she is. I have not read any other books in the series, but will have to look for them, now that I am familiar with the author, her writing style and books. She definitely deserves a closer look. I was given this book to read and review honestly, ( )