Retired from law, Ben Kincaid is forced to return to the bar when a case—and a corpse—fall in his lap

After years of struggling, Ben Kincaid shuts down his small legal office and decides to make a living doing something that—compared to practicing law in Tulsa—is easy money: playing jazz piano. He buys a minivan to haul his gear, and gets steady gigs playing in a combo at Uncle Earl’s Jazz Emporium. His new career is just starting to take off when a body falls from the Emporium ceiling, knocking the wind out of Kincaid and sending him right back to his old profession. The dead woman is Cajun Lily Campbell, a

grand dame

of the Tulsa music scene and onetime girlfriend of Uncle Earl himself. And Kincaid must be careful as he readies the old jazzman’s defense, because there is a killer on the north side of town who would like nothing more than to hear the piano player’s last tune.

William Bernhardt (b. 1960), a former attorney, is a bestselling thriller author. Born in Oklahoma, he began writing as a child, submitting a poem about the Oklahoma Land Run to

Highlights

—and receiving his first rejection letter—when he was eleven years old. Twenty years later, he had his first success, with the publication of

Primary Justice

(1991), the first novel in the long-running Ben Kincaid series. The success of

Primary Justice

marked Bernhardt as a promising young talent, and he followed the book with seventeen more mysteries starring the idealistic defense attorney, including

Murder One

(2001) and

Hate Crime

(2004). Bernhardt’s other novels include

Double Jeopardy

(1995) and

The Midnight Before Christmas

(1998), a holiday-themed thriller. In 1999, Bernhardt founded Bernhardt Books (formerly HAWK Publishing Group) as a way to help boost the careers of struggling young writers. In addition to writing and publishing, Bernhardt teaches writing workshops around the country. He currently lives with his family in Tulsa, Oklahoma.