Review: "Pro Bono" by Thomas Perry

 

Pro Bono by Thomas Perry Mysterious Press, 2025   Pro Bono, by Thomas Perry, is a lightning fast, surprising, and uniquely structured—there are two separate plotlines with one acting as a catalyst for the other, but otherwise never converging—chase thriller. Vesper Ellis, a beautiful, young, and wealthy widow, enters the law office of Charles Warren with concerns that someone is embezzling the investment accounts her late husband had managed. Since his death a few years earlier, Vesper hasn’t done anything with the accounts other than place the quarterly statements in their respective folders. But lately she has noticed the accounts seem to be stagnant even as the market is going up. Warren, who has his own experience with fraudsters, takes the case seriously and when Vesper disappears shortly after leaving his office he reacts as if something nefarious has happened. He contacts the client who referred Vesper to him, any other of her friends he can find, and finally the police. In the background, an old heartbreak of his mother’s resurfaces, also involving financial fraud, which is only tangentially related to Vesper’s plight but plays a large part of the story anyway. Pro Bono is vintage Perry: the plotting is swift, the action is fast, and the pages seem to burn in the reader’s hands. Much of the background plot (or the catalyst plot) is used to build Warren’s motivation for helping Vesper—a widow being defrauded by bad actors, which is exactly what happened to his mother. But it is more than that and it plays out in a surprising and dangerous way. Pro Bono is far from Perry’s best. The separate plotlines are both interesting, but I had hoped the two would converge in a satisfying way, and both are dependent on coincidence. If you’ve never read Perry before, I would suggest starting elsewhere in his backlist, but if you’re already a fan—you’ll like this one, too.

Check out Pro Bono on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.