Book Details

A TAUT COMPELLING TALE OF LEGAL INTRIGUE


A taxi skids to a stop at a hospital’s emergency entrance on a rain-soaked Chicago night. A stricken black man staggers out, supported by his wife and his teenage son. A mislabeled CAT scan sends a simple procedure horribly awry. The hired hand of a two-bit ambulance chaser passes the wife a business card. Bertha Roosevelt’s begun a two-step with the sharks. Across the Atlantic, a veteran partner in an old Chicago law firm reviews a medical-malpractice contract with a powerful upstart of a London insurance company. Everything looks so clean and proper, so very British, that he doesn’t read the finest of the fine print: A flourish of a silver pen and the law firm of Wilson & Thompson is high on the sharks’ dance card. Back home, five young fortysomething up-and-comers at Wilson & Thompson—longtime friends of varied ethnicity—gather for drinks at their favorite sports bar. A breaking television news story stops their lazy chatter dead…and launches their last-man-standing marathon with each other—and the sharks. The Dance of the Sharks watches as power, pride, and raw ambition are paired with both honest integrity and sleek manipulation in a tangled tango on two equally slippery sides of the Pond. A pair of wildly different Chicago lawyers—a sex-and-drug-fueled heel whose family and friends are collateral damage in his climb to the top, and a grizzled shyster plotting a gilded retirement via a deceptively easy mark—find that sharks come in many more shapes and guises than they’d imagined, in uncommon habitats like the shores of Lake Michigan and the banks of the Thames.

 

About the Author

Russell Pelton

Russell Pelton is a veteran Chicago litigator whose close relationships with the medical profession and the insurance industry, coupled with his experience as a partner in three major international law firms, bestow him with eye-opening insights into the elements that make up The Dance of the Sharks. A graduate of DePauw University and the University of Chicago Law School, he lives in Chicago’s northern suburbs. He has spoken and written extensively on the medical/legal issues that provide the background of this compelling novel.

Also by Russell Pelton

The Sting of the Blue Scorpion
Enemy in the Shadows