Plano Reads: What Happened to the Bennetts

Mystery Book Club’s pick for July is What Happened to the Bennetts by Lisa Scottoline. Please join us for our discussion on Thursday, July 18 at 7 p.m. at Davis Library or through Zoom. If you would like to attend the meeting virtually, please register here.

Available in Print | ebook | eAudio

Your family has been attacked, never again to be the same. Now you have to choose between law…and justice.

Jason Bennett is a suburban dad who owns a court-reporting business, but one night, his life takes a horrific turn. He is driving his family home after his daughter’s field hockey game when a pickup truck begins tailgating them, on a dark stretch of road. Suddenly two men jump from the pickup and pull guns on Jason, demanding the car. A horrific flash of violence changes his life forever.

Later that awful night, Jason and his family receive a visit from the FBI. The agents tell them that the carjackers were members of a dangerous drug-trafficking organization—and now Jason and his family are in their crosshairs.

The agents advise the Bennetts to enter the witness protection program right away, and they have no choice but to agree. But WITSEC was designed to protect criminal informants, not law-abiding families. Taken from all they know, trapped in an unfamiliar life, the Bennetts begin to fall apart at the seams. Then Jason learns a shocking truth and realizes that he has to take matters into his own hands.
Sometimes justice is a one-man show.

-Provided by the publisher

A hypernormal suburban family’s trip home from their daughter’s soccer game leads them down a rabbit hole of criminal complications. For some reason—maybe just because it’s a Mercedes—a pair of gunslingers pick court reporter Jason Bennett’s ride to carjack as he drives along a quiet road with his wife, photographer Lucinda, and their teenagers, Allison and Ethan. In the scuffle that follows, one of the carjackers is shot along with Allison, who dies in the hospital. Wait, it gets worse.

A pair of FBI agents knocks on the Bennetts’ door at 3 a.m. to tell them that John Milo, the escaped carjacker, has framed Jason for the murder of his accomplice, George Veria Jr., in order to save himself from the wrath of Junior’s father, the kingpin of the George Veria Organization. Time is of the essence, the agents assure Jason and Lucinda: They have to leave their house and their old lives behind right now and go into the witness protection program. Sure enough, minutes after the three shellshocked Bennetts allow themselves to be driven off, a representative of the GVO sets fire to their house and follows up the next day with similar fires at Jason’s and Lucinda’s offices.

Warned off social media, the Bennetts can only watch helplessly as their friends and neighbors issue pleas for them to get in touch and self-styled “citizen detective” Bryan Krieger decides to launch his own freelance investigation, fueled by slanderous innuendo. Every time Jason thinks he’s finally got the situation figured out, Scottoline tosses in explosive new complications in the most relentless of all her mysteries. A high-octane thriller whose hero is tossed into one impossible situation after another. Best started early in the morning.

After a successful career in corporate law, Scottoline released her first legal thriller, Everywhere that Mary Went, in 1994. Her debut was an immediate bestseller and was nominated for an Edgar Award, the most prestigious award given in crime fiction. Her second novel, Final Appeal, won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original in 1995. She has gone on to write 31 novels to date, all of which have appeared on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. Her novels consistently receive rave reviews, including from the Washington Post who called her most recent domestic thriller After Anna a “deliciously distracting thriller [with] a stunner of a story line.” And Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised her wildly popular Rosato & Associates series as “punchy, wisecracking thrillers.” Scottoline also writes humorous nonfiction and a weekly column in the Philadelphia Inquirer, called “Chick Wit,” with her daughter Francesca Serritella.

From the Penguin Random House website