Lisa Scottoline, The Truth About the Devlins ***

The Truth About the Devlins is a solid example of what I call a "supermarket thriller." It is the literary genre that most resembles the crime procedurals that you find all over network TV. A whodunit murder mystery, characters sketched quickly through personal quirks, a resolution that ties together the various subplots. The Devlin clan are lawyers, so add in white collar crime and familial dynamics.

The book is well plotted, although I did guess the basics of the solution early on. I'm not sure I believe that the bad guys would resort to this level of violence, but hey, the story has to have stakes and clock-beating action. 

Scottoline avoids the most annoying tics that often mar the genre, like twists that depend on non-communication between characters. However, the dialogue does tend toward blocks of exposition rather than natural speech, and characters do form lifelong bonds of friendship or enmity based on a single encounter.