LEVINE vs. WINSPEAR

By Paul...

Let’s duke it out, Jacqueline.

Yesterday, the Southern California Booksellers Association announced its book award nominees for 2006. Yep, PARDONABLE LIES and SOLOMON vs. LORD are nominated for best mystery. The very formidable other nominees are T. Jefferson Parker’s THE FALLEN, Barbara Seranella’s AN UNACCEPTABLE DEATH, and Denise Hamilton’s PRISONER OF MEMORY. Hey, it's a privilege just to be mentioned with these terrific writers.

For all the other categories (nonfiction, fiction, and children’s books), check out the SCBA website. Winners to be announced at the “Authors’ Feast” October 21, Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.

MORE UNABASHED FLOGGING AND SHAMEFUL STRUMPETING

KILL ALL THE LAWYERS goes on sale today, and as you can already tell, I’m engaged in unabashed flogging and shameful strumpeting (Dave Barry’s term) of my own work. A quick synopsis of the new book.

Why does an ex-client want to kill Steve Solomon? When Victoria Lord learns the reason, she’s angry enough to murder law partner, too. Or at least break up Solomon & Lord. . This time, a psychopathic ex-con comes between the squabbling Miami lawyers, but his real target catches them both off-guard.

Here’s Chapter One.

GONE HOLLYWOOD?

The Legal Times says I’ve “gone Hollywood.” Tony Mauro, the savvy journalist who’s covered the Supreme Court for a couple decades, wrote a very kind profile of me yesterday. How kind? He called FIRST MONDAY, the CBS show I co-created, a “well-meaning stab at dramatizing the Supreme Court.” He could have called it a “bloody disaster.” Here’s the opening of his piece:

"Paul Levine, the one-time Miami journalist and big-firm lawyer, has gone Hollywood. But he still writes Florida — comic Florida legal thrillers, to be precise.

"His rapid-fire Solomon vs. Lord series — three books published in the past year, and one more due out next spring — has earned him a rightful place in the upper tier of Florida mystery writers. That genre, capturing the sun-baked depravity and zaniness of the Sunshine State, has boundaries wide enough to embrace John D. MacDonald, Edna Buchanan, Carl Hiassen, and even the humorist Dave Barry.

"Now Levine, who first joined their ranks a decade or so ago with the Jake Lassiter series, has outdone himself in a new series by moving toward the screwball Hiassen end of the spectrum, but with a dash of John Grisham’s empathy for the underdog lawyer."

Complete Legal Times article here.

THIS WEEK’S POLITICAL QUOTE

Okay, it didn’t happen this week. But it’s a doozy. President George W. Bush, commenting on the so-called medical malpractice crisis. “Too many good OB/GYN’s aren’t able to practice their love with women all across the country.”

SPORTS QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Has the wide wounded world of sports ever been so befouled with such a variegated cast of bums, bores, preening egotists, miscreants, felons-in-the-making, abusers of drugs, drink and women, liars, cheaters, thieves, hypocrites and just plain creeps as it is now?” – John Crumpacker, in the San Francisco Chronicle.

By Paul