Two Kinds of Stranger
by Steve Cavanaugh
Elly Parker is a TikTok influencer. Her millions of fans love the live videos she posts of her life, so when they’re following her dinner preparations to celebrate six months of new-married life, they also see her shocked discovery of her husband and best friend in bed together.
This totally upends Elly’s life. She leaves her husband, holes up in a hotel and puts her influencer account on pause.
But one of the things her fans loved were her daily random acts of kindness, and her belief in “RAK” is genuine. When she sees a man in the subway on crutches, struggling to get a suitcase up the stairs, she stops to help him.
That proves to be a mistake, and she barely escapes a violent attempt on her life. She wakes up in hospital with serious injuries, about to be interviewed by police. But to her dismay, they don’t consider her a victim — instead they arrest her for the murder of her former husband and the former best friend, who’ve been found dead in their apartment.
Elly knows who to call: Eddie Flynn, a New York defense lawyer with a reputation for winning cases. Eddie, who was a con man before he was a lawyer, prides himself on using skills that work in both professions: distraction, manipulation, misdirection and persuasion.
Eddie’s own life is complicated. His wife has divorced him and remarried. Their teenage daughter calls Eddie for help when it seems her mother and step-father are in trouble … and soon Eddie has two murder trials on his hands.
This is a fast-moving and suspenseful mystery and legal thriller. I promise you’ll be impatiently turning the pages, wanting to know how it all turns out.
Steve Cavanaugh was born in 1976 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, growing up in the time of the Troubles with everyday exposure to violence and risk. In a family with one parent Catholic and the other Protestant, he was an avid reader from childhood, becoming hooked on thrillers and crime novels after his mother gave him a copy of “The Silence of Lambs” at age 12.
He moved to Dublin to study law at 18, then moved to Cardiff, Wales, to complete a Master of Laws. While studying he tried writing screenplays, but stopped when he failed to interest a producer. Returning to Belfast, he obtained his solicitor qualifications and made a name for himself defending several high-profile civil rights cases.
When his mother suddenly died in 2011, he decided to return to fiction writing after a hiatus of fifteen years. Despite having a young family and working fulltime as a lawyer, he wrote in the evenings after the children went to sleep. He finished the first draft of a novel within a year and in 2014 had a short story, “The Grey,” published in the Belfast Noir anthology.
Meanwhile, after something like 40 rejections, his novel obtained offers from four publishers and went to auction in the UK and Germany. The first volume in the Eddie Flynn series, it was published in 2015 as The Defense and became an international bestseller.
In 2018 the third in the series, The Liar, won the CWA Gold Dagger for Crime Novel of the year. All of Cavanaugh’s novels have been nominated for major awards and are consistent international bestsellers. Two Kinds of Stranger is his ninth novel featuring Eddie Flynn.
Cavanaugh has been a full-time writer since 2019. He has a wife and two children, and lives in a suburb of Belfast.
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