I’m judging a 2020 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory
glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

Intrigued

this was hard to get through, i was initially interested in the premise, strong female leads, legal issues, corporate espionage but the writing was too one note for me and i felt hard to care about it after i read some of it, i made it through but then why?

Bland, formulaic, weird descriptions of people... this is done better elsewhere. I just didn’t find it interesting at all, and when the story tried to pick up it always stalled back out with unnecessary character stuff about people who were still cardboard cutouts.

The story of corporate law and espionage getting out of control marred by an average execution. There are several storylines, and the characters are mostly bland.
There is a failed merger and two corporations going to court over it, but the case and the secret letters, that may fall into the wrong hands are not clearly explained. And they are too important from my point of view, to be seen only as McGuffin device.
The pieces move, and the pace is ok, but there is no point for a reader to care about any of the characters involved..

I'm not really sure if it was my version, as I received an eARC from netgalley, but this book was choppy and pieced together in odd ways and out of sequence.

I'm really hoping it was a formatting issue. As for the overall story, I thought some parts were very interesting and I couldn't wait to uncover the truths of what was what. The journey taken was quite entertaining and suspenseful, and I kept wishing I had read some pieces in order but my mind was able to rearrange to see the entirety.

I didn't like the ending. Now again, it could have been the version I received but it was just cut off. Just felt like mid chapter and no real resolution in the end. Anticlimatic.

*thank you to netgalley for the earc*

Corporate intrigue combined with good old fashion mystery. Elizabeth, cold , beautiful in the corporate sense has hired the fixer Valerie to take care of a problem for her. Valerie no stranger to uncomfortable situations comes at the problem her way with her team. Thus is a read and a half. It is well worth your allotted reading time. Just the description of the subterfuge it takes to return a bit of money has your heart racing.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. I really liked the bulk of the this book, great character development, strong female protagonists, lots of little surprises along the way. Then the ending... no spoilers, but I honestly did not get it. Why end the book on this note? Spoiled it for me.

A corporate New York thriller unfolding at breakneck speed, "Clean Hands" makes for entertaining reading. When a mobile, with incriminating documents, is stolen, a hotshot female lawyer engages a high-stakes fixer to, well, fix things. Featuring a cascade of characters, from petty thieves to underbelly procurers to Russian gangsters, the tale twists and turns agreeably. The Big Apple atmospherics are richly drawn. A certain flatness in the characters meant I never really engaged during my one-sitting lockdown read, but the tightly controlled pacing and the caper-style twists ensured an enjoyable journey.

Stop me if you've heard this one: A guy gets pickpocketed in a busy train station and is relieved of this phone. The guy is a lawyer and on the phone is some stuff that shouldn't be there. This stuff winds up in the wrong hands, and eventually we are introduced to the hands of big-time fixers, Russian mobsters, CIA spooks and other interested parties. Very entertaining, yes? Well, not so much. By the end, I still didn't know what the hell happened, or why. This plot is so convoluted and opaque that for a time I thought part of the book was missing. Nope, what's missing is coherence. I'm only giving it 3 stars instead of two because said entertainment kept me reading long after I should have quit.

I have really looked forward to reading a Patrick Hoffman novel. This one was fascinating but frustrating. Clean Hands featured a private-security “fixer,” along with geopolitics, espionage, and corporate malfeasance, and introduced two strong women and a large cast of supporting characters.

The writing was clean, the dialogue lively and realistic, the characters well-delineated. That was the fascinating part.

One of the frustrating elements: I came to the end of the book, but there was no end to the story. A person is murdered in the final pages, yes – but that person was in a chain of command, so surely the matter is unresolved. Unless this was meant to be a cliff-hanger? Hmmm.

But long before the ending, the biggest frustration: I was annoyed by the use of needless and unhelpful repetitions. Here’s just one example: Many, many characters were described as “skinny” (15 of them, according to my Kindle.)

Chris Cowley was skinny, Scott Driscoll was skinny, a man named Culpepper was skinny, Jonathan Redgrave was skinny, Rabinowitz was skinny, Dimitri was skinny, the man who led a home invasion was skinny. We have several references to Redgrave and to his alias as skinny, a short-skirted skinny woman, another woman who was NOT SKINNY -- and the skinny man in the motorcycle helmet.

After awhile, my inner reaction was: Oh, here’s another skinny guy! Wait – is it the same skinny guy? No, this is a different skinny guy. It might have been effective if the adjective had only been used in reference to the one central character, whether he was named or not – but to use it so broadly and so often, it was simply confusing.

Thanks to Net Galley and Atlantic Monthly Press for an advance readers copy.

Hoffman has written a book that has so much going on it often led to confusion as I tried to follow all the strings, but then that is probably the way it goes when an unlocked cell phone carrying a lot of confidential information is stolen and makes its way through the hands of dirty lawyers, petty criminals and blackmailers. You sit there turning page, knowing that an explosion is about to happen. It is a page turner, alright.

Who has the phone? That's the question for Elizabeth, an attorney whose junior lost it, and Valencia, who has been hired to find it. There's a LOT, a LOT going on in this relatively slim novel, and there are so many characters introduced early on that it's hard to sort out who is important. The bottom line- that two banks are fighting with one another and there are sensitive documents on the phone- would not normally lead you where this does. There's a ransom, leaks, lots of bad guys, and some murky conspiracy stuff. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. I wasn't a fan but that doesn't mean you won't find it interesting.

This book takes off like a rocket and is a darn exciting read. This is totally a MacGuffin book, what it's actually about is never made clear. The ending falls apart a bit as things come to an ending, but you still don't know who these people represent. If you can accept it for the fun ride it is, go for it. If you expect a book to make sense, look for something else.

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press June 2, 2020

Clean Hands blends a modern financial/corporate espionage thriller with an old-fashioned criminal mob story. Yet at the end, it isn’t either of those. The clever plot travels in unexpected directions. The book might not be a good choice for readers who need a hero they can cheer for — corporate law firms, small-time thugs, and people who play dirty tricks in the clandestine world tend not to win a reader’s heart — but the characters all benefit from well-defined if disagreeable personalities.

Chris Crowley, an associate at the Carlyle firm, has his pocket picked. He loses the iPhone on which he has stored incriminating documents about a client of the firm. His failure to password protect the phone, coupled with videos that show Crowley making eye contact with the pickpocket, lead firm investigator Michael D’Angelo to suspect that Crowley is not telling the whole story.

The head of the firm, Elizabeth Carlyle, freaks out because the documents relate to a bank that is the firm’s key client. The bank is suing another bank and neither financial institution has clean hands. Carlyle is worried that the documents will expose her client, and thus her firm, to major liability. She contacts her go-to outside investigator, Valencia Walker, who promises to recover the phone.

The story follows the phone as it gets passed from one crook to another, and then follows Walker as she follows the trail of people who touched it. The investigation takes her to some small-time criminals who plan to trade the phone for money, but the plot conceals a deeper layer of intrigue. The extortion that the theft sets in motion is part of a more intricate scheme with more powerful players who manipulate characters in surprising ways.

The story never loses credibility despite its byzantine plot. The story is built on smart storytelling rather than meaningless action scenes, yet it moves quickly and cleanly, never bogging down in unnecessary detail. Characters are constructed in the same way, with sufficient background to make them real without burying the reader in unnecessary biographical data.

In the end, Clean Hands depicts Machiavellian characters whose hands are anything but clean, but creates sympathy for their self-involved lives by placing them in compromised situations. The story avoids a predictably happy ending, but there is a satisfying amount of karma in this story of morally ambiguous people who are manipulated by shadowy forces they barely perceive.

RECOMMENDED

This book has a very good plot with lots of characters and twists and turns, but the writing is such that it's easy to follow. The pace is also good and steady, and it's hard to put the book down before the end.

Reading Clean Hands is like sitting, tied to a chair, watching the fuse burn down to a stick of dynamite, just waiting for the explosion.

A pickpocket lifts a young lawyer’s iPhone, and panic ensues at his firm since it contains confidential files relating to the firm’s biggest, most important client and a major lawsuit. Patrick Hoffman spins a masterful yarn detailing the how and why behind this misleading theft. The author relies on so many twists, turns, and intriguing characters that it is a challenge to keep up with the action. And the pace is relentless.

Warning: Don’t start this unless you can finish it in a single sitting.

Have you ever seen that TV commercial for spaghetti sauce - Ragu, if I recall correctly? "It's in there," the narrator says. Well, somewhere in this book is a story, I'm sure, but most of it went over my head in the jumble of endless characters, excessively lengthy chapters that switched gears several times with no warning and an ending that, to put it mildly, was abrupt.

That's not to say there's nothing going on, although sometimes it was hard to tell who was doing what to whom. Here's what I know (or think I know): A merger between two banks goes south, creating two mortal enemies who are planning to fight it out in court. One of those banks is represented by a heavyweight law firm and one of its high-powered attorneys, Elizabeth Carlyle. One of their younger associates screws up big-time by putting sensitive documents related to the lawsuit on his cell phone, which then gets stolen as he moves through Grand Central Station on his way somewhere.

Worried that the documents would be damaging to the firm if they fell into the wrong hands, Elizabeth hires a woman named Valencia, who appears to be some kind of professional mercenary, to find the phone and the thief. But then, the bottom falls out when Elizabeth gets a threat: The documents will be made public unless her firm pays a hefty ransom. Elizabeth agrees, with Valencia in turn agreeing to follow the money surreptitiously and, hopefully, get it back along with those pesky documents.

From that point on, things got so convoluted and ridden with characters, those characters' relatives and relatives of their relatives that I really couldn't follow it (although I did deduce that almost everyone involved was following almost everyone else to varying degrees of success). It might have gone more smoothly had the chapters been shorter. It's not a lengthy book, but there are only four chapters, so just about every "set" of characters gets a place in each one, but with zero transition. Many times I had to flip back a page or two in my Kindle when I realized I wasn't reading about the characters I thought I was.

In the end, although technically the writing (as in grammar, punctuation and spelling) had no noticeable glitches, I'm afraid this one just didn't click with me. Just the same, thanks to the publisher, via NetGalley, for the pre-publication copy.

This felt like half a novel masquerading as a full book.

Allow me to explain: I was really enjoying this for the first 3/4 of the book. Compelling plot, fascinating detail, good trajectory. And then it just ended rather abruptly, seemingly in the middle of the story.

The feel was much like reading half a book and then skipping to the last chapter. The carefully crafted, slowly but enthrallingly unfolding plot comes to a sudden halt, punctuated by a neat and tidy concluding chapter. I actually checked to make sure my galley wasn’t missing pages.

This is all a shame because the plot of this had great promise, and loved the minutiae and painstaking detail paid to tracing the stolen cell phone that started it all.

The author introduces a large cast of characters early, seemingly to give us a long list of suspects to ponder when deciding who is really behind all this. Unfortunately, most of them turn out to be mere plot device archetypes whose stories don’t go anywhere (even in service of the greater plot), and the villain is a shadow figure who has little to do with the rest of the book prior to when the person is introduced.

Hoffman’s accounts of both the crime and the tracing of it are excellent, but not enough to save a story that seems spectacularly incomplete.

Clean Hands by Patrick Hoffman is a great read! A real engrossing page-turner and worth the time of a read!!

I could not finish this one. My thoughts at about the one-third mark: L'm one chapter in and there have already been roughly 583 characters introduced, each of whom gets a multi-paragraph back story, and half of whom get a page or so told from their point of view. This had better settle down quickly.

By 50 percent in I threw in the towel. If anything, it's gotten more tedious. Just tons of extra description that doesn't need to be there, zero character development, and, for a thriller, a remarkably slow plot.